That's rediculous. You're recommending that people stick with old versions that are riddled with known vulnerabilities. There are some great lightweight modern OS's, like CrunchBang and Lubuntu that work well on old hardware.
Ubuntu 12.04, which has a version of Gnome classic, is still supported until 2017 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases). If someone is running hardware past this date, well, they are going to be on their own. That's life. That's software.