It might surprising to you, but most people haven't already locked themselves into the apple prison

My 20-year-old PC hardware will just about work, but a lot of projects are dropping support for 32-bit x86 these days.

If you brought the newly released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonah_(microprocessor) in 2006 - no Windows 11 or later, no Debian 13 or later, no Ubuntu 20.04 or later...