Many of the GNUnet tools have a GTK GUI, and whilst there will almost certainly be underlying command-line ways of achieving the same results, the documentation commonly refers to the the GUI tools. GUI stuff kind of implies desktop machines.
I'm sure I read somewhere in the documentation that ideally, the GNUnet host should be permanently powered up and connected to the Internet.
Small low-powered PC-on-a-board ARM type hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pi etc) would be certainly more economical to run 24/7 to this ends.
These type of hosts would obviously be under-powered compared to the average desktop machine. Would this be a serious problem for a GNUnet host?