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I would not buy a newer pc just to run Windows 11.

Neither would I... functionally there is not that much of a difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11. Although I do have plans to put together or purchase a more modern gaming machine for running flight simulators in the near future.

I purchased a couple of used HP Elite 8300 Ultra Slim Desktop computers in 2019. They are a little smaller than a typical Television DVD player and actually did come with DVD player/recorders built in. Their primary purpose is to use with a program called "Audials One" that we use to record high definition video streams to watch on our big screen televisions. We also use them for media servers, playing games, surfing the internet, etc. etc..

They have 3rd generation core i7 processors and I added GPUs so they are actually quite capable for computers that were released in 2012. With a little tweaking they will actually run Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 with high enough settings, FPS and resolution to still look OK, but they will not run X-Plane 12 because of limitations of the type of GPUs they are capable of handling.

They were business computers originally and came with Windows 10 Pro. For our purposes there has been no good reason to “upgrade” them to Windows 11 even though the current Microsoft licenses will allow this and they do have POPCNT support so they will not have a problem with the 24H2 Windows 11 update.

We likely will upgrade them soon because the Windows 10 expiration date is October 14, 2025, after which security issues will eventually become more of a concern, especially with computers like these which are left on 24 hours a day and used as media servers. But more importantly it is hard to say when Microsoft will tighten up their upgrade policies for these old licenses. Right now we can upgrade to Windows 11 pro for no charge but Microsoft is under no obligation to continue this.

Windows 11 does have a few minor advantages that are a little outside the scope of the discussion that this thread has gone into. And no, the primary program that I use these with, Audials One has no equivalent that I am aware of in Linux.

I should mention that the Audials One program with the “lifetime license” is nearly always “on sale” for $20... so if you are interested... do not buy it for the advertised list price of $80. https://audials.com/en/home

Overall, I would say that I have been very satisfied with nearly all of the Microsoft products that I have been using for decades. Most of the problems that people have are because Windows etc. runs on almost an unlimited variety of hardware. It is almost a miracle that their operating systems work as well as they do with this huge variety of hardware. And yes, I say this as someone who has years of experience installing and running various versions of Linux as well.