Oh i had one of those! The acer aspire one d250, with 1gb ram and 160gb of spinning rust.

Once i got Debian, fluxbox and emacs on it i was able to do java development (with ant and the j2me toolkit).

It was no big issue at all really, once you got linux on it.

I must say, however: the web was much lighter back in the day and electron was still to be conceived. That’s very relevant.