My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor.

Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great.

I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance.

The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.