> Needs to be powerful enough to run a text-editor like VS Code or Atom with some Node or Python in the background.
Sorry, I had a chuckle to myself that in 2018, we are worried about computers capable of running text editors!
Hail Electron and JavaScript ecosystem!
This is true. And I agree with you but modern "text-editors" are not really just text-editors. They come with git, syntax highlighting, debugging tools, etc...
Not quite an IDE, but not notepad either.
And people claimed that Eclipse was bloated. Yet I was able to run 5 years ago not one but 2 Eclipse instances on an ARM Chromebook with 2GB of memory compiling and debugging an Eclipse extension. This was in a crouton chroot [1] with few chrome tabs opened in parallel. When I edited the files that involved using a lot of IDE features for Java the system was snappy. The only time when I felt that the system was slow was when rebuilding everything. But that was expected given the slowness of CPU and RAM.
So how can a text-editor that is not even an IDE require more resources...