I'm so close to buying a Pinebook, and I know that everyone wants "just one more feature", but jesus, 4 GB or RAM?! If it had at least 8 I'd buy it in a sec. But 4 just won't cut it (thank you, modern web).
4GB is actually more usable than you'd think; most web browsers have performance settings that make the experience just fine with even a hundred tabs on low-end devices (Chromium gets more points than Firefox on this for its toaster mode), and outside of web browsers, there's not much else to worry about. If you set it up with one of the 'in-RAM compressed swap' solutions available like you should, you probably won't ever notice it, but even then it's still really fairly comfy.
saying "toaster mode" do you mean "Toast" extension from dotoast.com?
No, I mean the flag you can pass to Chromium for ultra low-end devices. --enable-low-end-device-mode
The small RAM sizes on these devices is a limit of the SoC. The RK3399 in the Pinebook Pro can only drive 4GB of RAM. The A64 in the original Pinebook and this tablet can use 3GB but that would mean using more memory chips.
4gb is fine if you run a lighter DE. I program go/python/c++ directly on a Jetson Nano w/ vim and firefox and haven't had any huge issues
While I'm not one of those people who work in the browser (bleurgh!), I find that it's a much bigger resource hog than my DM. My KDE desktop takes around half a gig, but it's Firefox that used to bring my old 4GB laptop to its knees.
OTOH a touchscreen-enabled device is exactly where a heavier DE might make some sense. GNOME3 is still only borderline-usable on 2GB of RAM (though you can obviously work around this by adding swap).
I don't think that heavier = better at tablet UI; yes, GNOME3 went that direction, but so did matchbox.
Gnome 3 is since a year or so the memory-heaviest Linux DE. You may get a better experience with another DE!
did you see https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/? I haven't tried it yet, but it looks light and touch-oriented.