Some of the bloat is institutional, or maybe we should say, "civilisational"? Supporting TLS, modern hardware, media codecs, and so on - this puts a lower bound on the size of a "full" desktop OS, before you even consider a web browser. The next question is what kind of software do you need to get useful work done - not everyone writes code; if you want to edit audio, video, photos, do CAD, etc sometimes you simply need the horsepower.

Also, check out this: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challe...

I'm not sure how much horsepower or anything do TLS require but until very recently there were Win98 drivers capable of supporting almost-modern hardware. Codecs never were a problem on Windows 98 (thanks to the K-lite Codec Pack) and this CPU even has hardware h264 supposedly. Editing audio (besides ultra-professional many-channel ultra high fidelity) never was a problem on Windows 98 either (there was SoundForge). Editing video comfortably still requires highest-end PCs. AutoCAD worked nicely on Windows 98 too. Most of the people apparently only need Office (which was Okay since Windows 3.x), a messenger, a PDF&picture viewer, a media player and a browser. The browser running today websites probably is the heaviest thing of these. Chrome on my Raspberry PI 4 still struggles on many websites (YouTube is the worst, also the most needed there). When I say Windows 98 I generally imagine a 233-500 Mhz Pentium 1-2 CPU with 64-512 MB RAM generally (in fact the 64 MB of RAM in this title is exactly what caught my attention: I immediately recalled the days when I had a 64MB PC and was perfectly happy with it, and I still don't need anything it couldn't easily do those days).

Thank you for the link by the way.

> If you don't have an old computer, don't worry! You can still use your regularly computer and create a virtual machine with low specs, you would still be more comfortable with a good screen, disk access and a not too old CPU but you can participate.

Not really fair. Disk access always is a game changer. Migrating my Core 2 Duo laptop from 1 TB HDD to a 512 GB SSD made it feel like a totally new PC. I didn't try Windows 98 in a VM but Windows XP feels way faster in a VirtualBox than on bare hardware on the same PC (I believe that's because of caching, simple virtual hardware stack probably also contributes to lightning-fast booting).