I have a pile of dell e series with the og i7 in them. Still can run windows 11 but yeah Linux is beautiful on these things.
Yeah, I have a couple of e6220s, one running MX Linux and the other Win 10 IoT LTSC. The MX one is my "road warrior" travel laptop as it's tough and still acceptably fast, but I also don't care too much if gets lost or damaged.