I really should increase my supply of "spare" computers. Need more Linux boxes. I had Windows Subsystem for Linux almost somewhat working for a while under Win11, then gave up on it.
Take one of those and get Mint cinnamon. If any are 32 bit boxes go get this as the best for those. Mint Cinnamon 18.3 32 bit.
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3445
A soon as you have it installed go shut off the updates, you wont need them and they don’t support it anymore anyhow. You will find that will not matter. And your Firefox browser will be outdated. Just run a command line update and upgrade to bring all the apps up to date with their new changes.
You will have a 32 bit machine that plays like a new one.
We use WSL on Win 10 as our dev platform. Our team develops embedded sw in C and Python using gcc. We use VSCode and gitlab all within WSL (we run an in-house edition of Ubuntu inside the WSL container). We can even access the build server through the corporate VPN from home. Onboarding is a bit of a chore but we document everything on a wiki on our gitlab repo page so new team members can get set up.
I need to get my Proxmox box into service and fire up as many Linux containers as needed. (Next weekend’s project!)