I think those reporting success running Linux on old hw should state the distro and window manager that they’re using if they want to provide useful feedback. I’m not in that group, but Tiny Linux comes to mind. Possibly Alpine? Probably better info to be had from daily-drivers.
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My first try would be mint, second endeavorOS with KDE
totally doable. But if you yeet the bloat, windows 10 will be more than fine. My dad runs windows 10 on a i5 2430m all in one. My old school computers had i5 2400s and 4 gb of ram and they ran windows 10 without too much issue.
Yeah I’ve installed LTSC on a couple of machines too (goofygoobers version, I think) so that’s another option
You also can upgrade them to Win10. Make sure you have a AD domain along with monitoring and blocking as required in your area.
You should not connect machines running Win7 or 8 to the internet.