Remember guys. It's not your PC that's sluggish, it's Windows that is.
Every Windows release gets more and more sluggish, that's why minimum system requirements keep going up. While Linux minimum system requirements stays about the same.
Friendly reminder that Debian still has an i686 build that in theory supports processors as old as the Pentium 4, and they only dropped their i586 build (that went back to the original Pentium) this year.
Interestingly/amazingly, it doesn't support all the architectures that the kernel supports. The kernel still supports 486 processors, although modern Linux on a 486 would actually be extremely slow since all the modern CPU capabilities/extensions are missing. There was talk about removing 486 support last year (increasing the minimum CPU for the Linux kernel up to the Pentium 1) but I don't think that's actually gone anywhere yet.
It's probably mostly legacy systems for things like industrial automation.
You can actually still buy industrial motherboards with ISA and PCI slots, for both older CPUs (like the Pentium 4) and newer CPUs (like modern-ish Core i3/i5/i7). There's also clone CPUs that behave the same as older ones.
A lot of industrial systems are big, expensive, last a long time, and were designed for use with particular hardware, which is why there's a pretty decent market for clones of old hardware.
Having said that... I'm not sure they'd use a newer operating system on these systems. The OS they run is likely 20 years old too. So... To answer your question, I'm not sure. Retro hardware enthusiasts tend to use an OS from the same time period.
I have a Pentium 4 line PC that I use for work. It’s actually a Xeon but same architecture. It has the only board I could find with USB 3 and SATA 3. Thing is a beast. Threw a 970 in it for a while while I didn’t have a gaming pc, and I had no problems playing (2017) contemporary games at 1080p60 in almost all cases.
I still use it as my repo for schematics and as the body to my over desk displays. I’ll probably keep it for another few years at least. It works great.
Well, it's not like I want to (although I do), it's just that customizing whatever else is there on the market to my liking is either impossible or requires more time that I care to spend.
Also, depends on devices. Not like I could install something else on a smartwatch with half a gig of ram, for example :)
Yeah, I have my Lxqt desktop customised a bit like different icons and fonts, although I'd like to more (the pc having 3gb of ram is a serious limit).
Specifically beacuse I want to have different layout compared to windows beacuse it's a bit (well probably more than that) bad, especially the windows 11 one, I got to try that one out at my school).
When I get a new computer I definitely want to try and install a different distro to try out the customisation.
Well, I kinda dig this, I'm using lubuntu and it's certainly better in some ways than windows, and I couldn't play games on this thing anyway so it's not like I'm loosing functionality, when I get a new pc I'll certainly install some different distro and try it out
I just installed lubuntu on an old laptop this weekend actually. It ran like a top but for me that desktop environment is clunky so I ended up using Fedora on that machine and so far it is working well. That machine has only a 32 gb HD.. so my options were limited.
I like gnome a lot personally, and one distro I've had a lot of luck with that comes with gnome by default is pop_os, so I would recommend that when you upgrade! Just as a generally well configured (and still lightweight when compared to windows) distro. Just about anything that supports Ubuntu runs on it without much if any fuss too