Here comes a monster, mostly pointless post, but typed it, so posting it ... enjoy.
Want to comment a bit more, that's one thing about minimal gnu/Nix that's been bugging me, modern browsers have gotten a tad ridiculous in terms of the resources they use, in many ways totally understandable, as again .. they aren't developing for a time when the avg user of their software is restricted to 512mbs + single proc anymore. So they develop the browsers they put out to use more resources, add features, multi-threaded/process-core and can clearly be very beneficial.
Though Firefox and am assuming Chrome/ium can also be tuned to a ridiculous extent, can be config'ed to be much lighter/faster. If someone were to setup a minimal profile to use with FF, disable auto-image load, javascript, tuned general settings etc could still be a candidate on really low-spec too, there's also numerous forks of FF and has to be same for based on Chrome's which no doubt are lighter regarding sys-overhead. I just prefer actual FF directly from Mozilla or the actual code having come from Mozilla. They are pros when it comes to web browsers and all that's involved in that field. Been dealing with developing a very popular web browser for a long time. I trust their ability/judgement. Not so much a small team of hobbists playing browser maker, maintaining whatever forks ...
Links2 + xterm could be a dang fine solution for low-spec hardware and several other circumstances, like being on a crappy internet connection or worse an expensive + crappy metered connection etc. Didn't really focus on it, as am way more intrigued by the links2 cli-mode + terminator thing I've been playing with. There's no shortage of open source developers and projs which aren't going with the hey, the system resources are there, why not, let's use ALL of them outlook. That's of course in all things Nix, the sheer number of amazing tools is mind-numbing, including what can be done with browsers.
Also to point out the obvious, though the braindead FUDinista's will endlessly whine and give dire warnings of disaster and certain doom about using dated software, the whole it's no longer getting bug/sec fixes, blahblahblah. Great software doesn't stop being great because new versions with higher version numbers come out, all those previous Debian iso's + assoc software pkgs are still archived and available for use indefinitely, as are all the former versions of FF, Mozilla maintains an online archive. All that software is still awesome, still accessible, still available freely and would run great for as long as whomever chose to use it. Provided they apply some common sense. Hades ... there's still gazillions of people running WinXP, still works great for them and can/will for a long time to come. That even more so applies to gnu/Linux ... Many more options, better quality software etc etc.
When Stretch or whichever goes EOL, my OS is not going to look online and go, Oh ... I'm declared end-of-life, sorry going to stop being awesome and running great now, it's been fun dude, BINK ... stops working. Could honestly keep using Stretch for many, many years after EOL no problemo or even install something from further back and the same thing. Remember having a #!(Crunchbang)Statler install(which was based on Debian Squeeze)idled at 38mbs-RAM, had whatever was latest FF at the time and could open 70tabs and still not be touching swap on a 512mb-mem, P4(single-core) Dell desktop, thing blazed and could still fairly easily recreate it and such a setup would blaze indefinitely. Noted time and again, when someone tells you almost anything is impossible with tech, often means they just don't know how to do it, never tried, not uncommon for the same with the OMG you shouldn't do this-that, you can't do that crowd, they simply don't know what they're talking about or are referencing materials which were provided by someone else whom also had no idea what they're talking about. While of course sometimes they're right too. The devil as they say is in the details and YMMV. Use your brain ...
Again... someone can't expect Debian to design it's stable release in such a way as it'd be less user friendly for 99.993% of users which have more current avg spec'ed systems to benefit that tiny minority stuck with a single core, 512mb-mem pc, that's clearly why they've made the netinstall iso's available. So somebody whose willing to learn, invest effort etc, can tailor a Debian install to be anything they want, including an OS which could run great on an ancient system too.
Someone isn't willing to devote time/effort, learn what's possible with Debian gnu/nix ... then yeah, use one of the gazillion niche distro's who try to do xyz thing for users. Plenty of amazing distro's out there too.