I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.

In college we had a network of Sun workstations and some of the machines had only 8MB of RAM, IIRC. This was in the 90s.

Then again, the X desktop was really minimal and I would use them mostly to code in C using a terminal.