If you like to enjoy life, I would recommend not using any of these machines. I believe, that the oldest full featured, trouble free, modern distro with modern Desktop Environment (DE) would be Intel second generation Core Sandy Bridge CPUs (2010) with more than 4GB RAM. If you will not use GUI/graphics, you could use the core duo CPU.
If you intend to maintain those systems in the future (say 2-3 years time frame) with modern, fully supported distro with DE at the time then your minimal spec target is likely 7th or 8th generation Core Skylake or up. Graphics will likely be the limiting factor. 8th generation (2017) lines up with minimal CPU for MS Windows 11, so that should be the safe target when getting pre-owned computer. I stress that "hassle free", "modern, fully supported", desktop or laptop with "modern supported DE". In general, setting up, and maintaining, modern OS on 10+ years old hardware will not be fun. This is especially true for us who are not in our teens anymore = we do not have decades of active life ahead of us to burn trough without much consideration. Hope that helps, Tomas PS: If you want modern, trouble free, fully supported, low power linux desktop on cheap. Consider Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 GBs sold at $60 + box + the official Pi5 USB-C power brick ..... It will fit into your trouser pockets, will run circles around the HW listed below, and it will most likely be fully supported by the raspberry Pi OS (Debian derivative) for the next decade. On Tue, Aug 27, 2024, 08:40 Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote: > I have three machines whose processors are 64 bit capable. > Processors identified by running lscpu: > > Machine 1: > Architecture: i686 > Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 540 @ 2.53GHz > > Machine 2: > Architecture: x86_64 > Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz > > Machine 3: > Architecture: i686 > Model name: Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5300 @ 2.60GHz > > Will the OS linked to by https://www.debian.org/ run on all three? > [For historical reasons I currently run 32 bit on all.] > > TIA > > >
