I use it to produce 50-minute radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. I work with a Thinkpad T42 from circa 2004. Swapped the PATA HDD for a Compact Flash card -- prior to this, everything was just surprisingly snappy thanks to Tiny Core Linux's RAM boot; now the machine is also wonderfully quiet.

Granted, this is pushing it, but I've been using this setup every day for almost two years. (I just like to use old hardware until it dies -- or, is this what old IPS-screened Thinkpads generally turn people into?)

Sure, you probably should be a "computational minimalist" by nature (e.g. there is an older version of Chromium, but I suppose your main browser will be Dillo -- which, actually, is just wonderful once you get used to it). But if you are a minimalist, I'd say it's a really solid system.

Also, it's fun for me to think that I bought this Thinkpad T42 three years ago for €20. And now I use it as my main workhorse in a field where typical setups consist of new-ish MacBooks with high-end SSDs and an up to date version of Pro Tools. (And where people occasionally still think that "duh, you can probably only edit a text file in Linux".)

So it's an awesome, clean, fairly easy to maintain distro (e.g. in case of a typical install you have a pristine system after every reboot). And the community is very friendly and responsive.