I took the screen off my old dell laptop and turned it into a mini blade server with built in UPS. It ran for years. I have no doubt the battery was knackered by the end.
The only reason I replaced it with a Mac Mini 2012 was because it didn’t support usb3 and 4K video saturated the usb bandwidth.
Now my 2012 runs Ubuntu server + docker for those interested :)
This feels like emulation with extra steps