> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy
I'd really like some context here. Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is all I need".
I wish that software is constantly updated and tuned for the past, not the future. I find quite ridiculous that we only keep pouring ram, disk, processor and yet tools lag behind. How is that possible?
JetBrains to my understanding like a traditional IDE similar to Visual Studio (classic) that comes with a lot of stuff in the box that lighter weight text editor inspired development environments don’t have.
It is completely expected that it’s slower.
I remember my first job I had to request a new workstation just to tolerate using Visual Studio. (Actually, all I asked for was an SSD, but my manager over-delivered and went ahead with a whole new workstation)
Personally, I found JetBrains IDEs to be perfectly usable on a dual core third gen i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Thinkpad T530 from ~2013
It is of course sluggish to index large projects, but it's equally slow on my brand new Ryzen system. Otherwise it's completely fine. It was my main daily driver dev machine until 2024.