It depends on what you mean by the early days of each - in the really early days of Linux (1992) computers were probably going to cost north of a few thousand dollars and the type of computer Linux was designed for (a multi-user system for dumb terminals) would cost tens of thousands of dollars. By the time linux became a thing more than a handful of people in any given state knew about you could probably run it on a machine costing somewhere around 300$.

Minecraft has never been demanding resource wise, I'm sure early versions had serious performance issues but running it on a cheapo laptop has always been totally reasonable - it's quite accessible (it was written in java even!)