Re: I, for one...
It *will* run Linux Mint. I know. I've tried. Also Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo.
The experience is sub-optimal, however. Sound won't work at all – after days and days of hacking in which I managed to get some white noise (and software toggles to control that white noise, I suppose), I ended up passing sound down HDMi and out the headphone jack from my monitor to my real speakers and that was as good as I could get and certainly unsatisfactory.
The GPU will work for compute tasks and can be bludgeoned into appearing to achieve something akin to desktop compositing but never both compute and presentation at the same time and the performance is abysmal – resizing a window or scrolling a browser page is insufferably poor. Watching a full-screen, in-browser video is a joke. Full-screen 3D stuff appears fine and renders at very high frame rates but the horizontal tearing apparently can't be solved – any kind of v-sync functionality just doesn't work – presumably, this is because whatever is controling the GPU isn't playing nicely with the window manager and compositing engine.
I've tried the nVidia official, closed-source drivers and open-source ones and nothing makes it better. I've tried it under Gnome, XFCE, KDE, etc. I've even tried Wayland but, yeah, Wayland + nVidia are/were a match made in hell.
The sound device *appears* as some kind of HD-Audio-esque thing but just defys typical behaviour for such hardware and only produces noise signals out of any audio jacks, whatever the configuration.
There's also the on-board WiFi – I gave up on that, completely, but don't need it, either, so that isn't too much of an issue. (Not right now, anyway. I did need it, recently. It would be nice to know the hardware does work if I should happen to need it, again.)
My "Windows 10" hardware is just a pile of incompatible rubbish – that's what. I gave up fighting with it, long ago, because I honestly can't be bothered to keep trying. After the days become weeks, once or a couple of times, round, one just gives up.
Part of the problem is that everything is on-board and what's not on-board is the GPU and that's just too expensive to simply replace. To avoid having this issue, again, I'll be making sure that my next box has a motherboard that is 110% Linux-friendly (i.e. ALL the on-board stuff works flawlessly, without any need to fight with it) and the GPU is proven good under Linux before the return-window on the part runs out.
Of course I won't just land-fill the old hardware. It will probably work fine as a headless server which never needs to emit sound, connect to WiFi or use the GPU in anything other than compute modes.