I trialed a 2GB memory, dual-core-no-hyperthreading low-clocked Celeron ("hacked") Asus Chromebox as a workstation a couple weeks ago. As long as you can avoid

I trialed a 2GB memory, dual-core-no-hyperthreading low-clocked Celeron ("hacked") Asus Chromebox as a workstation a couple weeks ago. As long as you can avoid running electron or other webshit and don't mind doing some things on the command line it could handle light tiling window managers (i3, dwm, awesome) just fine, even at 4K. Actually the Web was even pretty OK as long as I only had a couple pages open at a time and used Surf (just trying to open Firefox took so long I gave up—Surf is almost instant) If you've got a remote machine for you VMs or Docker and maybe for some remote X sessions for heavier web browsing, it's viable. Really as long as I avoided web garbage and used light software the thing felt fast. Very responsive, low input latency. Hell it even booted much faster than the beast of a machine I replaced it with (that's Void Linux's doing, by having a minimal default boot environment so the boot process isn't doing very much that I haven't explicitly told it to do, so no useless-to-me daemons or scripts slow the boot). Which shouldn't really be that surprising since my primary development and gaming desktop at one time was a fraction as powerful and did GUI multitasking just fine (including Firefox—I maintain they really lost their way as the lightweight-but-still-featureful browser we all loved after the 1.x series and have never been as good since), but, it is surprising these days when we have single browser tabs that can just about fill 2GB of RAM all on their own and forget what modern computers can do when we're not using them to run the computing equivalents of 3-legged-races. Only reasons I didn't upgrade the RAM and keep going with the experiment were 1) it could only drive my 60hz 4K display at 30hz, and 2) manually dicking around trying to fix 4K scaling issues isn't my idea of a good time and you pretty much have to run a heavy desktop on Linux to eliminate those problems without tons of fiddling, it seems, and such a machine cannot handle Gnome3 or KDE and all their background crap and Javascript (ew) and such.