It’s tough, because we’re about to enter an era where having old, still working tech might actually be a functional boon for a lot of people as the costs of new fabrication explode and the cost of a personal computer becomes nigh inaccessible.

I do think there’s a limit, however. I have several older devices that while they have 64 bit CPUs, they have 32-bit bootloaders. Thankfully, Ventoy seems to work well with them still in terms of being able to boot and function properly. But I do wonder if, considering the used market we may soon be sitting in, if all the effort to drop 32-bit support from modern Linux distributions could end up making that market more difficult when there’s still some decent-ish devices from that era to do some minor tasks, even if they produce a higher power draw.

To me, the overall power draw is a bigger deal than how old the processor is. If it’s an old processor but has a streamlined design that isn’t a power hog, then it’s still worthwhile. If it sucks up a lot of energy just to do some basic stuff, then it’s probably more costly than it is worth in terms of energy consumption. If you can’t find any more modern solutions, sure, use the power hog, but I do think the real future of computing is in low-power, high-latency devices as we head into a more fractured future.

Anyway, as for practical use, I don’t have a beefy server to run a lot of major services on or to have multiple virtual machines all running at once. I just use actual old machines for headless servers for small services that can fit on and not be overwhelming to these devices. I have a whole stack of self-hosted services on what amounts to (mostly) a bunch of second-hand equipment. Six server boxes, around 25-ish services with about 20-ish of them docker containers.