I have a super old lenovo nuc that I use for the same purpose. I ended up putting Linux mint with xfce on it and it works great. Not the fastest for sure but def usable

Some of the best interviews I’ve both done and given were “take home” assignments of exactly that. You’d have a scaffold in a relevant web framework and then have a few days to add a feature or debug something and then submit a link to a GitHub repo with your project.