I distinctly remember having to use mplayer/mpv over VLC, and youtube-dl, etc. (definitely not Chrome!) just to be able to play any reasonable video (usually do

I distinctly remember having to use mplayer/mpv over VLC, and youtube-dl, etc. (definitely not Chrome!) just to be able to play any reasonable video (usually downscaled from 1080p). And Zathura for lightweight PDF reading (with customisable colours!). And of course vim and emacs (you're not running IntelliJ, PyCharm, etc. on that). But it worked really well, and in retrospect was probably good for productivity as you couldn't really do anything else. So I'd download Coursera videos and watch them on the train with mpv/mplayer, etc. - it was frustrating when I had to fix some GUI code on-the-go though, and could barely use Glade with the tiny resolution and screen.