I had Compiz Fusion with LXDE running on my Acer Aspire One and I was amazed at how well it performed. Wobbly windows for live video from the webcam and everything. Running Gentoo's emerge did take all day though. In retrospect, Arch would have been a better fit.
I distinctly remember having to use mplayer/mpv over VLC, and youtube-dl, etc. (definitely not Chrome!) just to be able to play any reasonable video (usually downscaled from 1080p).
And Zathura for lightweight PDF reading (with customisable colours!).
And of course vim and emacs (you're not running IntelliJ, PyCharm, etc. on that).
But it worked really well, and in retrospect was probably good for productivity as you couldn't really do anything else. So I'd download Coursera videos and watch them on the train with mpv/mplayer, etc. - it was frustrating when I had to fix some GUI code on-the-go though, and could barely use Glade with the tiny resolution and screen.
It worked well, but I could pretty much only run one program at a time. It felt more like the old microcomputers in that respect!
But that forced me to use dwm and Arch Linux, and learn a lot more in the process.