Edit: probably worth noting that esp32 cores are an order of magnitude higher frequency than those 90s computers.
Nowadays it would be more practical to add ESP32 support to uClinux and skip the unnecessary performance hit of the VM.
No kidding! My intro to X was seeing it load bare-bones on my enthusiast friend's 2M (could have been 4) 386.
I think he brought xfontsel up or something and you could see the scanlines being drawn one at a time :)
A couple of years later, I was running fvwm2 and a very serviceable desktop at work in 8M though. (AFAIR, anyhow.)
With the wireframe mode, it's even faster on moving and resizing.
Implementing a wireframe mode on CWM should be dumb easy and a lot of older machines would profit from that.
But back in the day you could browse without images perfectly fine, as the important ones where under galleries with custom links and downloading them was really slow.
Also, when writing, it's probably better not to have a multitasking OS - no distractions ;-)
This was my setup for a considerable amount of time. Even though it is hard to believe in our fast paced times it must have been for several years.
The 386DX with 4 MiB was my first Linux machine and my first PC for that matter. 4 MiB was not enough to even run the Slackware installer, so you had to partition and mkswap manually from the command line before you could run it.
Apart from that it was a pretty workable machine for those days standards. I used it from the console most of the time, but X11 worked, even if it was slow as molasses, as you said. I remember running GNU chess. While you could play from the command line it was one of the apps where the GUI was really helpful.
Good times!
A 386SX with 20MHz, 40 MB and 2MB, running Windows 3.0.
16MB was indeed another level!
I was a little spoiled since my dad worked for a telco, so we tended to have decently modern computers and modems for that reason. I was REALLY fancy when I got 128k ISDN in 1996.
I do remember being very cautions when I first setup linux because things actually cared about the number of blocks, cylinders, etc, and if you got it wrong things broke in confusing ways.
Absolute luxury! I had 4MB three years later in '95... and in '96 I got the Linux Kernel Internals book which came with a slackware CD, forcing me to purchase my first CDROM drive.