I'm probably asking the wrong question, or about a more complicated solution than it needs to be but here goes.
1.) I love my decade old Puppy laptop running bionic64 now, and possibly fossa64 in near future, and don't want to be tied to a desktop again -- or even have the desk space for monitor and keyboard.
2.) I currently do occasional video editing with this laptop (as mentioned in other threads here) using Kdenlive 17.x on Bionic64.
3.) That is the ONLY combo of editor, editor version, and Puppy OS that works well enough with my older laptop to render multiple tracks real time in the monitor without stuttering or jumping ahead. (I've tried MANY combinations over the past 3 years).
It works well enough for now, up to 1080p and 50+ scenes with lots of dissolves. But it JUST manages, and the writing is on the wall. Plus I'd like to have more flexibility in which video editors and versions I can use.
4.) I can't afford a new laptop with high level graphics capabilities.
5.) I have an old ATX desktop tower Pent 4 era.
Question: Is it possible to re-motherboard the tower and run it headless as a server, doing the video editing there, but using the laptop as a client terminal for it via wifi?
Would that provide the rendering speed in the video editor monitor that I need? This is the crucial question, really. In a video editing program is the bulk of the work for presenting a real time visual monitor of the project done by the CPU, or by the graphics card. I'm guessing the main CPU.
If that is do-able, my thought is that I wouldn't run the tower server frequently, just when I need to do a video. Otherwise my puppy laptop does everything else I need.