I was broke at one time. We were using cheap, broken, patched up used laptops for homeschooling, and couldn’t afford a license for every machine. That’s when I got annoyed and started exploring Linux. I ended up on PCLinuxOS which I LOVED. It just worked, solid as a rock.
I got into Mac when I could afford it. I have ONE windows machine specifically for flight simming. My windows machine can take 20 minutes to boot. Sometimes it’ll do it in two minutes. My Mac laptop I just close the lid and sleep it. Reboot maybe monthly, just for kicks, I guess. Mac is solid as a rock.
I kind of forgot about Linux, basically.
But my kids resurrected one of those laptops recently, and have been playing the games on it! They have zero acclimation issues switching from one OS to another. That’s normal for them.
Yep, Almost everything can be used universally on all. Old on new or new on old, there are very very few “this is not supported” issues. :)
Something else I should have commented on. You hit on something very important. There is no such thing as “Your computer is too old to use this version of windows”.
You can resurrect almost ANY old computer with Linux. No matter how old, there is at least a light version of some kind of Linux out there that can be installed and make it work.
Although pretty techy, I have talked with those who have resurrected old IBM 286 models and used them with ELKS Linux. Floppy drives and all.
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks