You forgot to mention the slow build times when using Gradle. If Android Studio is too heavy for his laptop then Gradle's hardly going to be much lighter.

Unfortunately, even Flutter requires it when building the production-ready Android version of the app. Perhaps it's time Google switched to their own Bazel as the default for building Android apps. As a bonus, the syntax is a lot lighter than Apache Groovy's.

My CPU is "Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3217U CPU @ 1.80GHz" par lscpu(1), and I have 4Gb RAM. I should not have to struggle running end-user desktop software except inherently-heavy tasks like video editing and similar memory-heavy or very CPU-intensive stuff. And running a text editor, a compiler and a debugger is definitely not so. I'll go as far as saying that most desktop software that I can't run easily is just plain bloatware. Android Studio, definitely checks out.

I don't know Gradle, I'll try when I have free time. I have one project which can be better off as a Java API app (based mostly on Intents). WRT Flutter, I have not experienced any performance problems with it so far; though I haven't built a "production-ready app" yet. But given it'd mostly be a rare task, that'd be bearable.

Some web pages I read make it look like so, and not only, some say directly that it's impractical. But maybe it's my infamiliarity with the ecosystem that makes me think so. If you know of a nice tutorial I'd really appreciate it!