I wrote my master thesis on Acer C720 (2013) running xfce. I used some octave but I mostly needed it for latex.
These days I don't use it anymore because the screen is not that great but it aged incredibly well.
Nice post!
For completeness: Apache Arrow is also adding sparse tensors in c++ [1] and wrapping them with python [2] (although the documentation for Python might be a bit lacking at the moment).