Can you elaborate a bit? What kind of DE?

Openbsd user here:-)

What do you count as a DE ?

Right now I'm running mwm, emacs, Firefox, NetBeans, a couple of PDF viewers and lots of xterms.

Well if you are using emacs, like I do, what else do you need? Ok maybe a browser outside of emacs and a pdf viewer:-) And a tmux session somewhere.

Someone once said:

I just need a bootloader for emacs :-)

So, you also have a functioning OpenJDK 8 or so to run NetBeans?

I assume this means an x86 machine, correct?

Yes this is on NetBSD/amd64, with a native OpenJDK 8.

OpenJDK 8 will build for arm as well but it doesn't have a JIT.

Which laptop? How's battery life? Does s3/s0 suspend and resume work?

desktop != laptop.

Whoops. Misread that.