Most individual programs will run with 4GB but you won't be able to have multiple open at the same time.

It is really only a problem with electron apps that you can usually easily replace with opening the corresponding website on a browser and have more native and less memory hungry alternatives.

If you favor them over a huge DE, a distro with a lightweight window mamager / wayland compositor will only use around a hundred of megabytes, so with 3.8-3.9GB you have plenty of memory to run apps running on regular OS toolkits.

And having a bit of hygiene like exiting apps you are not actively using goes a long way.

A couple of Electron junk apps.

The Claude Code installer doesn't.