To be fair you can 100% have a PC that’s too old and/or too low speced to run Linux with certain desktops. For example I personally wouldn’t use a PC with under 8gb of ram today if I wanted to run a modern desktop and Wayland compositors basically require (or soon will) Vulkan 1.0 support (for Nvidia that’s Kepler GK110 or later, AMD GCN 1.1 or later, and Intel Broadwell or later)
Kepler GPU need the 470 proprietary driver. It doesn’t work with current kernels 5.18 and newer. Even with an older kernel, I was unable to get Wayland to work.
Nouveau works with Wayland, but it does Vulkan in software, and had several noticeable visual bugs. I also was unable to get hardware acceleration for video to work even when installing the needed binary firmware. Besides that nouveau‘s feature Matrix is bit lacking.
Also if you have hybrid graphics in a laptop with Intel Iris and NVIDIA for example (OPTIMUS) there are additional issues to figure out.
Other hurdles might be wifi and bluetooth chips from Broadcom for example. You might have to install additional drivers, disable powersaving, and configure other tweaks to get Bluetooth audio and wifi to work properly.
You can absolutely keep using older X11 desktops or WMs forever, that doesn’t mean you’re getting the same experience as everyone else on a modern Wayland desktop or WM
The main problem is that nowadays a lot of software is JavaScript downloaded when web browsing. And that might just be too demanding for ancient hardware if it was never tested on it.
To be fair you can 100% have a PC that’s too old and/or too low speced to run Linux with certain desktops. For example I personally wouldn’t use a PC with under 8gb of ram today if I wanted to run a modern desktop and Wayland compositors basically require (or soon will) Vulkan 1.0 support (for Nvidia that’s Kepler GK110 or later, AMD GCN 1.1 or later, and Intel Broadwell or later)
Kepler GPU need the 470 proprietary driver. It doesn’t work with current kernels 5.18 and newer. Even with an older kernel, I was unable to get Wayland to work.
Nouveau works with Wayland, but it does Vulkan in software, and had several noticeable visual bugs. I also was unable to get hardware acceleration for video to work even when installing the needed binary firmware. Besides that nouveau‘s feature Matrix is bit lacking.
Also if you have hybrid graphics in a laptop with Intel Iris and NVIDIA for example (OPTIMUS) there are additional issues to figure out.
Other hurdles might be wifi and bluetooth chips from Broadcom for example. You might have to install additional drivers, disable powersaving, and configure other tweaks to get Bluetooth audio and wifi to work properly.
The thing about Linux is that you have choice. You can put Xubuntu on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM and it will fly.
You can absolutely keep using older X11 desktops or WMs forever, that doesn’t mean you’re getting the same experience as everyone else on a modern Wayland desktop or WM
There is a world of difference between “not getting the best experience” and “the entire computer is unusable now”.
The main problem is that nowadays a lot of software is JavaScript downloaded when web browsing. And that might just be too demanding for ancient hardware if it was never tested on it.
is anything you can’t do with antix on a pentium 4 even worth doing