People have been running GUIs on much less for decades--though if you're trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there's tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.
I'd have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.
I used to run a GUI on a Raspberry Pi B+ and it was doable, but that was a decade ago and many programs have gotten a lot more bloated since then. Of course if you are just running your own software, you can optimize it to run with very little RAM.
People have been running GUIs on much less for decades--though if you're trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there's tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.
I'd have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.
I used to run a GUI on a Raspberry Pi B+ and it was doable, but that was a decade ago and many programs have gotten a lot more bloated since then. Of course if you are just running your own software, you can optimize it to run with very little RAM.
You can do it easily if you aren't running full HD or something heavy. Enlightenment runs great on my Pi B and 2 B.