I discovered two small things today, neither of which is particularly earth-shattering, but both have some bearing on working with out-of-date hardware.
First, and probably more impressive of the two, is the fact that it takes a 120Mhz Pentium 10 hours to compile tidy. You might know tidy as a venerable tool for arbitrarily cleaning up html code; it’s nothing fancy, has no dependencies, results in about a dozen files in the Crux package. Otherwise, it’s a rather plain program.
Building it took 599 minutes, done over the course of the day, while I was at work. Ordinarily I would compile it on another Crux machine and transplant the package to this one, but my attempt at that this time resulted in errors when I tried to run it on the Pentium. Since it’s a relatively small item, and didn’t seem like it would overwhelm things, I let it start on my way out the door.
And according to the time utility, which I had the foresight to use when I started building, it finished about 10 hours later. What a speed demon. 
The other interesting tidbit is a little more specific to Arch Linux, which I’m using on the Inspiron while it undergoes some changes. Just out of curiosity, I installed both the gnome and the gnome-extra groups, which more or less equates to the minimum for a Gnome desktop. And I trust Arch to keep it very svelte.
Total space required for all those dependencies? Only 1,345Mb, according to pacman.
Maybe that’s not a surprising number, but it was to me. I didn’t really equate Gnome — and only Gnome, although that does include ancillary software and the login manager — as almost a gigabyte and a half. I knew it was chunky, but I didn’t realize it was obese.
But that’s only in my estimation, and I have been called insane about these things. I take it as a compliment. 
Allow me to spam.
It’s not even including Mono and friends
Actually, I am surprised that Gnome is that small. I wonder if it will get smaller now that it defaults to using Webkit.
The only thing that would affect would be Ephiphany, wouldn’t it? And maybe Yelp — don’t know if that uses HTML.
For that matter, even if it’s faster, I don’t know if Webkit is any smaller than Gecko. *runs off to do research*
What a surprise; Gnome is bloated..
About that other thing (since nobody mentioned it yet), I’m starting to find that things are a little backwards there. Compilation gets faster every time a new processor enters the game, yet people always compile less and less. Where’s the reasoning, huh?
Oh, btw, you could always have left some of the apps out of gnome and gnome-extra. Things like orca and empathy are worthless if you don’t use them. Either way, 1 GB isn’t really that much for people like me who’ve got several hundreds of gigabyte