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Ten year old software is very different from ten year old hardware.

The parent (you replied to) discussed the state of browsers

The problem with this tiny projects is that you need a web browser. And good luck browsing the web in old PCs [...]

As I can imagine now, a lot of things will not run on 10 y.o. hardware once you get limited by the last base OS you could install.

In the context of Linux, ten year old hardware is widely supported, and will not limit what base OS version and software is installable, though its capabilities might affect usability. We're not really discussing OS X here, where planned obsolescence is such a huge factor.

That's not really a Linux problem as far as I can tell. You can install a five-minute old Debian-testing on 10 year old hardware without too many surprises.

Main private laptop is an HP elitebook 8440p from 2012 and it works perfectly fine with modern web and streaming, currently running Fedora 36.

It came out with a core i7 and it supports up to 16GB of ram. I upgraded it to 12GB a few years ago and an SSD.

Caveat: it was a model from the professionnal line, came with free ram slot and is easily disk swappable. The same could not be said of a model from the consumer line that would have had its memory maxed out at 2GB.

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