Let's see what I have for local development: - Virtualbox (with 2-3 various OSes up, for testing) - a webserver - a database - graphics editor - IDE (code+DB)

With RAM-backed filesystem cache, I can fill the 8 GB of RAM easily - and not having to fall back to disk-based I/O speeds things up a lot.

So no, not essential - but pretty convenient, if you ask me ;)