“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…”