It doesn’t because you run out of security updates after 5 to 6 years. Which I hate. But nowadays switching to android alternatives is an option once a phone is no longer supported.
Or Apple which is surprisingly good in that department, my sister’s iphone 11 is still receiving updates.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.
It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it’ll be slow at, 3d modelling it’ll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.
As much as I detest Apple, they do work really well as work phones. My work phone is an iPhone 12. Outside of the somewhat degraded battery life because it’s 5 years old, it still works flawlessly.
That said, I haven’t updated it to iOS 26 yet, even though it’s available. My wife’s 16PM is running iOS 26 and she is not happy with the “upgrade”.
My last phone upgrade was in part because my previous phone didn’t have NFC, which is a significant technology nowadays. I wonder what’s going to motivate my next one, if it’s gonna be general performance, software support, or some hardware feature (like wifi… was it 7? That allocates a separate band for each device, so it doesn’t shit itself when you use more than 1 device in a large area).
It doesn’t because you run out of security updates after 5 to 6 years. Which I hate. But nowadays switching to android alternatives is an option once a phone is no longer supported.
Or Apple which is surprisingly good in that department, my sister’s iphone 11 is still receiving updates.
It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
If you actually tried to do anything useful on a 2004 machine, you wouldn’t post that.
A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.
It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it’ll be slow at, 3d modelling it’ll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.
As much as I detest Apple, they do work really well as work phones. My work phone is an iPhone 12. Outside of the somewhat degraded battery life because it’s 5 years old, it still works flawlessly.
That said, I haven’t updated it to iOS 26 yet, even though it’s available. My wife’s 16PM is running iOS 26 and she is not happy with the “upgrade”.
I would install Lineage on day 1
My last phone upgrade was in part because my previous phone didn’t have NFC, which is a significant technology nowadays. I wonder what’s going to motivate my next one, if it’s gonna be general performance, software support, or some hardware feature (like wifi… was it 7? That allocates a separate band for each device, so it doesn’t shit itself when you use more than 1 device in a large area).