I was running a laptop of this sort (HP from 2008, 2GB RAM, Athlon64x2 processor, 100GB HDD, nvidia card of the NV40/Curie generation, originally shipped with Vista) as a secondary machine up until a few months ago, and never had any serious issues with it under Linux. However, I was running Gentoo with TDE and no display manager (qingy doesn’t count), and didn’t try to use it for CAD or anything else that I knew was out of its league. It did okay at email (with a native client, not webmail), word processing, 720p video playback, and native games with low requirements (like Simutrans) I retired it in the end because it takes forever to compile gcc on a machine with those specs, and updates started hitting too frequiently.
Its replacement is only about 4-5 years newer, but has much better specs (quad i5 (or was it i7?), 16GB RAM, etc—it would have started life as an expensive business-grade machine, I think), so not useful for comparison.
I was running a laptop of this sort (HP from 2008, 2GB RAM, Athlon64x2 processor, 100GB HDD, nvidia card of the NV40/Curie generation, originally shipped with Vista) as a secondary machine up until a few months ago, and never had any serious issues with it under Linux. However, I was running Gentoo with TDE and no display manager (qingy doesn’t count), and didn’t try to use it for CAD or anything else that I knew was out of its league. It did okay at email (with a native client, not webmail), word processing, 720p video playback, and native games with low requirements (like Simutrans) I retired it in the end because it takes forever to compile gcc on a machine with those specs, and updates started hitting too frequiently.
Its replacement is only about 4-5 years newer, but has much better specs (quad i5 (or was it i7?), 16GB RAM, etc—it would have started life as an expensive business-grade machine, I think), so not useful for comparison.