Well, 1993 or 94, I had Linux, X11, fvwm(2?) and emacs running in 5MB. To be fair it was not very fast, and one later and extremely expensive £600 upgrade to 16MB made it perform much better.
Today I do the same with Gemini/Gopher/light HTTP pages and nsxiv to display the pictures and mpv+yt-dlp to watch videos/music/podcasts.
That on an Atom N270, which today is like having 4MB and a 386 back in the day in 1999.
- Use Luakit, set hardware-acceleration-policy to either always or never, just try.
- Setting an Android 4.x User Agent in Luakit will help, too. Often pages sent for phones/tablets are much lighter.
- git clone https://github.com.com/stevenblack/hosts ; cd hosts ; sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p' < hosts > hosts.new, append that hosts.new file to your current /etc/hosts file.
- MuPDF it's far lighter than Okular.
- Fluxbox + Rox + Zukitre GTK2/3 and Fluxbox theme can be far lighter than the whole DE. Ping me back for an easy setup.