I’ve tried this before. The build in the picture is wasteful of energy and unsafe.
This is cheap to make, can be easily taken down, and if instead of tea candles bigger candles are used it can heat the pot enough to radiate some perceptible heat. It also makes for a good conversation starter.
But would I place all my bets on this? No, not really. It should be considered a dire last resort, for a very small room, in an extreme situation.
Once, some years back, I posted a topic on how could I slim down my Gnome DE.
It sparked a rather long and complex discussion and the bottom line was that Gnome integration was already at a point where so many parts depended on so many it was not an easy task.
I opted to move to a GTK compatible DE. Currently I use XFCE but spent years with Mate.
My first laptop was a MSI AMD+Nvidia, circa 2005. It was a low spec machine yet it outperformed and outlived laptops coworkers had with higher specs. Back then I used Ubuntu and drivers were available out of the box. It managed cpu better and the machine ran smoother than under windows, which would stress the cpu more. Ran it for almost 9 years and I retired it because it made no sense spending the €100+ to have the graphics card repaired.
From that point forward, all my AMD machines were always responsive and reliable.
My current desktop is already 10 years (Sempron based) old and it outperforms my laptop, which is 5 years younger (AMD as well).
I am a bit of a Linux missionary and every single machine I ever managed to bring to the dark side always ran smoother under Linux, regardless the core, but Intel often posed some extra hurdle to install. One particular case I still remember today was a laptop that required to manually install network card drivers, both wired and wireless. The required driver was available in the installer but it always failed to load.
I’ll risk anything from the last 10 years will be good. I’d personally recommend a minimum of 8GB of ram, DDR3. The technology is really cheap and mature at this point.
As anecdotal as this may be, out of several machines I owned and installed and reinstalled over the years, AMD centric were always easier to install, while installing Intel based machines from friends and family always got me grinding my teeth out of frustation.
I vouch for AMD based on my history with working it - and I repeat: I am not a tech guru - even without putting linux support on the table. I’ve ran AMD machines for over a decade, with no hardware problems, while I had Intel based hardware fail me in three or four years.