I just set up a streaming TV media server with a Pi 4, it cost about 150.00 AUD. It's amazing.

Its kind of hard to be interested in these results without knowing more about the two installs. What was done to the "dirty" install to make it dirty? Also, was the "clean" install just a fresh vanilla install, or was there any debloat, cleanup, or optimizations made to it?

IT guy here, i have a very fast computer compared to some other people on the company, i think what makes a computer faster is the fact to restart it periodically instead than once every 3 months besides i clean temp files every weak or two, but yes, theres users who make the computer/laptop run slower

I suppose if you can't care about running licensed software. There is no legal way to run IoT on anything other than the hardware is shipped with (which would barely be considered a computer at all).

The time spent reading this article will probably exceed the time saved over a lifetime by this change. Quick enough is good enough.