

When it was first developed it was too heavyweight and too customisable. The effort needed to theme it was huge and a lot of the popular themes were poor from a UX point of view.
Still E16 was usable, and then the development of E17 started about 24 years ago. People are still on E16 you say?
I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn’t want to try it today though.