You underestimate just how crazy clean Linux is. For a while I ran Debian out of an USB 2.0 thumb drive on a machine that was already slow ten years prior – hardly a hickup. In-place updates didn't even take more than 15 minutes (which, considering how slow my storage was, is great).

I have Linux running on a 10 year old machine with 5400 rpm drives, and it does just fine streaming video to multiple TVs at once.. Helps that there are 5 of them configured as raid-5...

Well, 2 weeks after that happened, I asked my teacher if I could install Linux onto the PC and they agreed. Went for a minimalist arch setup since that's what I'm familiar with already, and it worked fine. Updates were still somewhat slow but they'd only take around 1-2 minutes maximum, excluding the download times for packages, and it ran smoothly.

That being said, Windows 10 on that craptop was fine for browsing, and boot times weren't too bad, only taking 30s on average. It's just that updating the system and using VS (since we were forced to use it as IDE until I switched to Linux, at that point I just went with neovim) were two major pain points.