The 8GB Pi4s aren't in stock anywhere right now that I can find (at least not for anything resembling retail price). Wait for the next run, or grab a 4GB one.
I've been working on gutless wonder computers for a while now, and while I do have some more powerful stuff, the various small board computers have been getting good enough that they're absolutely useful as daily drivers now for light to moderate use, to include full graphical web, software development, etc.
The main key is getting the root storage volume off the SD card, and then setting up compressed swap (and while some will argue, I would suggest that zswap is a
far better solution than the commonly listed zram, because it can evict old pages out to the backing file, and has better limits on RAM use than zram if faced with less compressible data).
Even a USB2 to SATA SSD adapter on a Pi3 is far better than the SD card interface, though USB3 makes it even nicer still.
I've done quite a bit of writing on the topic over on my blog - I /think/ I can still link to it from this forum, mods, let me know if not and just remove the links.
My original light desktop was a Pi3 - I did some work on the thermals, and tried a compressed filesystem to remove the chokepoint over the USB2 bus. That was a bad idea. btrfs and USB don't get along. It ran fine, until it consumed the filesystem. Just stick with something reliable like ext4...
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/03/project-pi3desk-building-awesome-pi3.htmlWhen the 3B+ came out, with MOAR CLOCK SPEED, I set about poking with it, and realized that it was quite hard to keep it cool enough under heavy load to stay at the rated 1.4GHz - it pulled back to 1.2Ghz easily under sustained load, even with a good heatsink case. But not with more heatsinks! I Kerbaled it up pretty good, and ended up with something that ran for quite a while as my light utility desktop.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-pi3bdesk-making-even-better.htmlThe Raspberry Pi 4 is a respectable bit of hardware, especially if you happen to crank the clocks up to 2GHz (you'll need a good heatsink case to hold performance with that, but it's totally doable - and it's no slouch at 1.5GHz stock clocks either). Plenty of RAM, USB3, 4k output, though it didn't have fractional scaling when I last poked with it - so don't use 4k on it. But it's absolutely capable of desktop grade work.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2019/12/building-raspberry-pi-4-desktop.htmlMy current light desktop is actually an nVidia Jetson Nano - it's a bit more expensive, but came out before the Pi4 by a while, and had 4GB of RAM. Plus a desktop grade GPU, not that I really care for my uses. I was interested in the RAM. That's been in service for well over a year now, and it's doing just fine.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2019/04/nvidia-jetson-nano-desktop-use-kernel-builds.htmlIf you're curious as to how all these little boards compare in terms of performance, I did some head to head benchmarking as well.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2019/11/battle-of-boards-jetson-nano-vs.htmlWhat I'd suggest, if you're interested in going this route, is a Raspberry Pi 4. It's the best all around SBC at this point for desktop use, and it has the best software ecosystem. The Nano is a respectable little machine, but doesn't have mainline kernel support, and... I'm probably going to replace it when I can get my hands on the 8GB Pi4. When I reviewed the Pi4 initially, it wasn't enough of a jump to justify replacing the Nano, and my board had some hardware issues anyway (it wouldn't reboot cleanly and was hard to get powered on reliably). But with 8GB, well, that's enough to justify the jump, and I'm using it more for various things than I was before due to some other shifts in how I use computers. Run the 32-bit OS with the PAE kernel unless you really like pain. aarch64 is nice, but there are many things that simply don't work. Apple moving to ARM should fix a lot of this, though, as software repos get fixed.
I'm also experimenting with the PineBook Pro - it's a $200, 14" ARM laptop. I quite like it, but I'm also deeply familiar with the quirks of running Linux on ARM at this point, and things like kernel troubleshooting don't bother me. It's not ready for mainstream use IMO, but if you're the sort of person who has followed most of what I've talked about, you'd probably be fine. It's a properly good looking little laptop that's also open source and repairable in the deal - the sort of thing I'm very, very excited about.
At this point, I mostly use Intel hardware for work, and the occasional heavy task in personal use, but I'm moving more and more to using light and cheap ARM hardware for personal use. I'd replace some of my heavier Intel hardware but there's nothing between the SBCs and the heavy workstations right now, and I don't need a $3k ARM workstation. I also don't game, so there's that...