First, I wanna ask: can we have a pinned thread/topic that's our little "r/NoStupidQuestions"? Sometimes I have very dumb questions, but I don't want to make a new thread for every single one (and trying to find my own, older topics is sometimes a challenge).

Second, what would be considered like the "minimum system requirements" to use Decker on Windows and MacOS? I was working on some box art for one of my projects, and I realized that I didn't actually know that info*. I could use my own machines as a baseline, but they're all workhorse computers (albeit a little on the old side, but still), so I'd hardly call them the minimum.

*I did try searching through the forums here, but it's possible(?) that someone had asked this but was using verbiage that I would never think to search...

Dunno what the minimum requirements are, but on my Core 2 Quad machine from 2008 (admittedly running Linux) Decker uses up about 60% of one CPU core when running in Firefox, and maybe 40% in native mode. Not sure about RAM, but it doesn't seem to be an issue either.

Decker doesn't have any per se minimum requirements; on older and slower computers it will run worse, but I'm always trying to make it usable on a wider range of devices. Some time ago I made changes to allow it to be compiled against SDL 1.2, which means that in principle it could be built to work on windows 98. RAM consumption will vary based on the size of the loaded deck and how much undo history you've accumulated; perhaps somewhere between tens of megabytes and a few hundred?

I did most of the early development for Decker in a not particularly beefy 9+ year old macbook air; Web-Decker should be usable on most inexpensive Android tablets or Chromebooks. Two years ago I posted about Decker being usable (if a little bit pokey) on the OLPC XO-4.

I made a general questions thread earlier and it now seems be stickied (thanks IJ) so hopefully people with small questions can drop in there if they don't feel like making a whole thread.

This isn't really about minimum system requirements for your purposes Kalli, but a small contribution to the subject of Decker's RAM consumption. I have two Decker windows open currently and this is what my Task Manager shows:

The top one is a small deck with a few doodles and experiments. 
The bottom one is a larger deck (about 100 cards / 3.5mb) that's been open for a week and has a pretty long undo history.

For the sake of experimentation I closed and reopened that 100 card deck and it's now only using about 70mb of memory.

I've tried Decker on a few e-ink devices, including a Kindle's browser, and animations suffer of course, and drawing is also very laggy, to the point that trying to draw a circle results in a triangle getting drawn. I didn't explore performance much, but I could handwrite with some care and add widgets and it wasn't that bad.

Actually much worse than those devices is a 1Ghz RISCV device, the ClockworkPI. All animations are amazingly slow: going from the first card to the second card in the demo deck takes 19 seconds due to the sliding animation. Even opening a menu and moving the mouse down it has Decker struggling to keep up with inverting the colors of the menu item hovered over. But, it does work! It's slow, but it gets there! The main issue here is probably that this is a single-core machine and Decker uses all of it, a case where optimizing SDL refresh rates a bit might really help.

But if you mean a 15-year-old consumer laptop that was good at the time, Decker should be fine on that. Lightly retro hardware might even work a little better than the most recent hardware because you'll get features like Tracing Mode that worked on X but have been broken by Wayland. Decker itself should be fine, and I think you can track the additional burden that you add with the script profiler.

thank you everyone for your replies! Everything y’all shared is super helpful!