I have a 2007 Core 2 Duo laptop. I think it wants to keep going and be useful (outside of the worthless IIRC GMA 965 GPU), but Dell only released XP and Vista 3

I have a 2007 Core 2 Duo laptop. I think it wants to keep going and be useful (outside of the worthless IIRC GMA 965 GPU), but Dell only released XP and Vista 32-bit drivers (both are dead OSes for modern apps), and finding and installing drivers for Vista 64 or 7 was difficult (I didn't try 10), and I kept getting random touchpad hangs on sleep-wake (broken on either the lock screen or the logged-in screen), audio hangs, etc. It's a better experience on Linux, though you have to use EasyEffects or similar to add audio EQ to compensate for the poor-quality speaker response curve. Xfce and MATE run fairly well (I haven't tested if KDE can hardware-render on a GMA 965), but 4 GB of RAM requires micromanaging, video playback is arduous, and running web apps (Discord, I'm trying to migrate off Google Docs one way or another) is a lag-fest. One notable aspect of laptops that's improved in the past decade-plus is multitouch trackpads. I have a 2013 Ivy Bridge laptop with "two-touch" tracking (the Linux kernel calls it Elan V3), but the multi-finger detection is deeply broken (a second finger will register at the wrong point if you tap lightly or near the edge, the two points tend to be displaced towards the same X or Y position if they're close but not identical along either axis, and both reported finger points tend to be displaced away from the actual touch point towards periodic quantized Y and probably X positions). I use it with edge scrolling, but that struggles too because the touchpad is bad at sensing touches right up against the edge, it's hard to even feel the edge with my finger, and the Linux kernel has a bug that halves the size it thinks the touchpad is (which I had to patch locally and rebuild the psmouse kernel module on every kernel update). I think MacBooks were ahead of PC laptops because they reused multitouch tech from iPhones, which Apple initially purchased from FingerWorks. One notable regression is a decrease in modularity, ease of disassembly, and repairability, caused by the rise of integrated keyboards into palmrests, nonremovable batteries (at least modern CPUs are more efficient), soldered RAM, now even soldered storage, in the pursuit of slimness and planned obsolescence.