"There are many great FOSS projects that utilise old PC hardware and give it a new lease of life. The best is desktop computing with various Linux distribution flavours like Mint, PCLinux, Ubuntu and countless others. In fact it is my considered belief that the best hardware to run Linux on is infact (almost) any machine that is at least 12 months old. It is possible, of course, to select components based on the degree (and maturity) of the specific support under Linux but this has two major drawbacks.
"The first is the most frustrating; some categories of hardware have poor levels of Linux support. For example, most LAN cards are now supported natively but that is certainly not the case for wireless (wifi) equipment, particularly for some Broadcom and Atheros chipsets..."
