I hear this sort argument a lot. But I never hear of anyone doing it, that is working on a 15 yr old computer for a while. I imagine with Linux it might not be too bad.
If you look at places where there isn't much pressure, you'll see plenty of old hardware and software doing just fine. For example, many shops I frequent are run on DOS-era programs, which are 100% totally fine for the job, and probably even better than modern replacements (less clicking, more typing = more efficient to use).
The Internet has made this infeasible. Everything has moved online, and 90% of online resources have grown very bloated, though Wikipedia would probably still work well.
Security is another problem. Windows XP would work fine if you can find 15yr old hardware that still functions (hardware rot is a real thing), but the number of 0 days out there is far too high.
All that said, I wonder if any Shoutcast streams still exist. I'm using Youtube Live for the same thing now days (orders of magnitude more CPU being used!).
Coding would work fine, except the old IDEs don't support newer C++ standards, and I'm accustom to my niceties in life, but if you can ignore that, life would be fine for writing code. Modern web platforms wouldn't work that well, writing code would work OK, but the resultant webapps wouldn't run that well.
Shoutcast is still around, at least as a protocol via Icecast. I dunno if it's still being used for widespread public streams, but I know people still use MPD + Icecast to stream their personal music collections.
The computer is now running Linux Mint just fine.
The only place it is lacking is the display: 1366x768 feels pretty low-res these days. Video playback has some minor screen-splitting, too.
Still, for browsing the web, watching <=1080p video, and hacking on some software projects, this old thing is more than capable.
> I imagine with Linux it might not be too bad.
Of course, that's a requirement. ;) NixOS is near perfection.
Until I could afford to buy a PC, that's the class of hardware I used.
Just pick your favorite Linux distro, and they will run like new.
It's also worth noting that Arch Linux started in 2002. That's the distro I settled on back then (NixOS wasn't around yet ;).
Probably wouldn't be good for a hard core gamer, but for Quickbooks, Email, and MS Word, I seem to be surviving.