What is the best way to use a discrete graphics card in linux?

Question

linux

Hello !
Such a thing, I decided to use ubuntu, and to master linux I
installed this whole thing on a laptop, there are two video cards on it, an integrated and a discrete
lived did not grieve on an integrated video card, with the help of ssd everything worked charmingly quickly, although 4 GB of RAM just
got here it's up to programming
as an IDE and the program itself takes up all the resources of the percent memory
, now I'm thinking how to use the discrete at this time? Will she help in this matter, or is it worth buying more memory?

Answer 1

In the BIOS, limit the maximum amount of memory used by the firmware and finish the RAM up to 8.
Install a light, minimalistic graphical shell, read something about the SWAP file (swap file).
PS The development environment is not specified, the direction, maybe you are developing and testing a 3d engine there ...