Minecraft does not manage memory well in larger amounts- I find that anything after 3-4 gigs of DDR4 makes barely a difference.
I believe Windows uses about 1 gig on standby, so 4 gigs should be enough.
The CPU and RAM are, when it comes to Minecraft, much less important than the GPU. Minecraft isn't really doing much in terms of game logic under the hood, but its rendering procedure is horrifying enough that you'll want to shell out more for a GPU relative to the rest of the PC.
I believe it runs best with at least 2 gigs of VRAM.
I'd push toward the first option.
I will note that, having run Minecraft on both Linux (x86-64 Arya) and Win10, I can say that it runs more smoothly on Linux, but there are waaaay too many variables involved in that to speculate on the real McCoy.
