Reduce, re-used, recycle
The old adage is to reduce, re-use and recycle - in that order.
In terms of reduce - my desktop machine is an old Core i7-2700K (I think) in a big tower case which still manages just fine. Bought in 2010, and delivery was delayed due to the motherboard being affected by the Sandy Bridge southbridge chipset bug. (Remember that?)
It's a bit of a Trigger's Broom today, having had a new power supply, new graphics card, replacement RAM and an upgrade to an SSD. All except the SSD were replacements due to failures, but the big tower case means maintenance is quick and easy. It might need replacing soon - but it'll have served me for 10 years, which means ten years in which I haven't bought a new PC. Or even felt like I needed to.
For re-use, it's my laptop. It was more for budget reasons than anything else that I bought a second hand Thinkpad. They're reliable and durable, so are excellent candidates for that. Again, performance is just fine and it meets my needs amply. I put Ubuntu on it, all the hardware (except for the fingerprint reader - which I wasn't going to use anyway) was supported without issues.
I'm sure that the Windows 10 Refurb Edition installation that was on it would also have been OK. But I do have more reservations about running Windows as a sustainable OS on older hardware. Linux just works - no need for manufacturer's drivers. And that's where Windows falls down IMO. I remember installing Windows 7 onto my desktop tower 10 years ago. Windows failed to find almost all the hardware - it booted into a low res, had no sound, no network, nothing. Ubuntu found everything but one of the network adapters (the built in one on the motherboard). I didn't even realise that the motherboard had Bluetooth support until I saw the icon next to the clock in Ubuntu! Then I had to reboot into Windows and spend an hour or two installing drivers for the motherboard - most of the time spent rebooting after each driver install, of course.
It's no doubt better now. A decade has passed. But as the Sonos issue shows, companies want to sell you new hardware. So sunsetting driver support for newer versions of Windows is going to continue to be a thing. Ironically, hardware support in Linux is now becoming superior to hardware support for Windows, especially if you want to still use old hardware.
Until we can convince vendors to have longer support periods, anyone attempting to reduce/re-use is probably better off moving to Linux.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
