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Any Linux desktop OS can be made "lightweight", e.g. just use i3, xfce4 apps and disable the convenience daemons you can live without. The real bottleneck is

• kiwijamo 3y ago
  I have family members who buy new computers every few years just so they can play web-based games on Facebook with reasonable performance. This is quite understandable given how poorly the Facebook website performs even with modern browsers with modern JavaScript engines but on older hardware. This IMHO is one of the dark side of JavaScript -- it may 'run everywhere' but it certainly doesn't perform well everywhere. It does not matter other sites work (e.g. HN) work just fine on older hardware, the Joe Public just want Facebook, Gmail, etc to work.
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  > The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that. I think ChromeOS solves that problem quite smartly, by starting the bare necessities to launch the browser and nothing else. No more moving parts, just the web, which is what 99% of computer use seems to be these days anyway. ChromeOS Flex seems to work pretty well for giving old laptops a second life. It won't run on your Pentium II but there are plenty of computers out there that'll work great. With Microsoft's plans for Windows 12, I can imagine a cloud-based Windows that you can use any old laptop with. As long as you have decent WiFi and a thin client loaded, you'll end up with laptops where hardware h264 decoding will matter more than CPU power and RAM.