Would an i3 with 4GB work? I want to convert the laptop for the kids.
Yes.
I have run plasma on much slower CPUs than that with 4GB of RAM.
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For a desktop environment that is so feature rich (some would say bloated), Plasma requires surprisingly little resources. It will almost run on a potato.
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Plasma even runs reasonably well on a raspberry pi 4…
your i3 will do just fine 
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I’ll be installing shortly. I wrote in a piece of paper, when you see the read light come on type ‘sudo pacman -Syu’ and then ‘yay’. I think they’ll remember as much 
Just typing yay is all that is needed. That is even easier to remember.
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Will that update pacman as well? If yes, why am I learning about this now. 
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Yes! One command, updates both repo and AUR packages. Easy.
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Lo and behold… a potato in action!
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 (2) @ 2.101GHz
GPU: Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset
Memory: 1929MiB / 3832MiB
Posting here while watching a Linus Tech Tips video. I wouldn’t dream of doing any video editing or such on this age old thing, but as a “surf and movie” laptop hooked up to a 1080p TV it works just fine.
An i3 will do the trick even better.
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That is amazing! I remember the days when KDE was a behemoth and competed with Gnome for sys resources!