It’s really just the browser that becomes difficult to use. For everything else you can find a decent lightweight option. I've been doing most of my computing o

It’s really just the browser that becomes difficult to use. For everything else you can find a decent lightweight option. I've been doing most of my computing on a raspberry pi 2 recently and it's just as productive as my main laptop outside of the browser, which is just an absolute hog for memory even when rendering basic pages. CPU I could definitely take a hit (say, remove speculative execution, which seems like it would "fix" spectre) as I don't need to do my taxes or write or listen to music at maximum speed. My video game console doesn't need security at all and can continue to speculatively execute freely. IMHO the days of general purpose compute at high performance are firmly over, different computation shapes have different cpu(/gpu) characteristics to optimize for.