Yeah, they run great. But they completely suck if people are used to a windows laptop from this year. Graphics and memory alone already make everything extremely slow in comparison.
Discussion
Gotcha, I don't do anything that maxes these out so my systems generally cruise on old hardware.
I suppose use cases requiring robust compute wouldn't be served well by repurposing old hardware paired with a Linux distro.
To your original point, better to evaluate a Linux OS on hardware that matches or exceeds the demand of whatever load you put on it regularly.
Linux is more efficient than Windows but it's not magic.
Yeah, I think every person that tests on older hardware than what they are used to gets disappointed by the experience. We should simply not encourage that behavior. They need to test with their current machines.