@rs-24 :-
Linux has one major advantage going for it. As Bob says above, it'll run on almost anything.......
especially stuff that's generally considered only fit for land-fill/recycling by Windows.
The only thing to bear in mind is that as you dig back through the years, older kit will generally work better with lighter-weight distros. As for the comment about 32-bit CPUs, you're talking around 20 years back for the last of those. Up till last year I was running a 'date-sympathetic' version of Puppy Linux on an ancient Dell Inspiron lappie with a 32-bit-only single-core Pentium 4, a gig of DDR1 RAM and a tiny 20GB plate-spinner (old-style hard drive). This was from 2001; long since abandoned and left for dead by the Redmond juggernaut, Linux kept it still alive and (mostly) useful......even though watching paint dry was perhaps a bit faster! "Leisurely" was the key-word here.....
Had to scrap it in the end, sadly, 'cos the graphics chip finally gave up the ghost.....but I
was rather attached to it; had one of the best keyboards I'd ever found, and we'd been places together, the old girl and I. LOTS of places over the years!
Now, I'm using a 2008-era Dell Latitude. 64-bit dual-core Core2Duo, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, and a 128GB SSD which some fool had managed to "persuade" Win10 to run on. No idea if it did; the very first thing
I did was to wipe the drive and install 'Puppy' to it instead.....
Exit madness, and enter sanity! Ahhh.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Point being, you can pick up perfectly serviceable kit, including refurbs from several years back, etc., online for a fraction of what you'll pay for a flimsy modern lappie with built-in obsolescence. Most will be more solidly-built, and they'll still have plenty of life left in them. I'll always recommend Dells, but older IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads and most Acers are apparently worth your time as well....
Just remember; the older the laptop, the "lighter" the distro required. Modern mainstream distros are getting so they need reasonably up-to-date hardware.......but on that hardware they'll not only run rings around Windows, they'll kick its butt in the process.
Mike.
