So my "Low power computing" idea doesn't seem to be panning out

Who'da thunk it, the raspberry pi isn't powerful enough to do much of anything.

It does do some things well, such as running a web browser doing very minimal work, such as running Tumblr or Spacehey, but aside from that, it falls apart.

Discord was already a major issue, having to use a third party client to use it on here outside of a web browser at all, only to have the client literally just be a stripped down web browser. It doesn't even run that well to begin with.

Youtube is just unpleasant, screen tearing being a very visible issue even when watching lower resolution videos.

I ended up having to change my OS from Ubuntu Mate to Raspberry Pi OS. While RPi OS is much lighter, its access to the apt repository is somewhat restricted, limiting the programs I could actually get. I couldn't even get a full, up to date copy of Firefox, I had to settle with a slightly out of date ESR release. Not ideal.

And the overclock I had set up to get any usable results appears to have made the machine unstable, soft locks happening all over the place. I'm willing to deal with a lot of bullshit, but the entire system locking up because typing too fast in the Firefox search tab strained it too hard is beyond that.

Maybe I can clock it down and get a bit of stability back, but I'm not sure how much further I want to push on with this. I knew what I was signing up for when I did this, I knew it would be a somewhat compromised experience, but it might be a little too compromised for me.

It's probably gonna be better off as a simple emulation box.