Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you really enjoy tinkering with computers!
- Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for staging servers and test beds.
- Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable hardware.
We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3 years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks.
We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient.
Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc.
The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way more cycles for nothing.
Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram.
I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with 3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.