I agree that the hardware may be wholly inefficient in that case: it is, after all, a low-cost netbook that wasn't really snappy to use even back in the day. I could grab a second-hand ThinkCentre for 50 euros, slap Blue95 or Linux Mint on it and have a very capable computer. But here, I'm trying to apply permacomputing principles, in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way. Machines that ran Windows 98 back in the day only needed a quarter of RAM to do this stuff (obviously I'm not talking about browsing the modern web or launching Electron apps), and this specific netbook was sold with Windows 7, so what I'm trying to experiment here is: how hard could it be to achieve that efficiency using currently available Linux software (and not a 2010 distro, although that's a thing I can experiment as well)? Your answers seems to point to "actually very hard and not worth the effort", which seems a very valid point. But I'm still curious to see how far we can go with old hardware, and how the Linux infrastructure has taken advantage of the capability increase of computers since then (that was why I asked about Wayland for instance). So thanks for the feedback!