You can use a lighter weight OS than a recent version of Windows, which will presumably require fewer resources. Or if some of the hardware goes bad (say the sc

You can use a lighter weight OS than a recent version of Windows, which will presumably require fewer resources. Or if some of the hardware goes bad (say the screen fails) but you don't care because you're just doing SSH, you can still use it. I have a couple of decade-old laptops that are perfectly happy to run Linux, and Windows 7 won't even install on them because they don't have enough memory. It's also conceivable that a different OS would have a lower thermal profile, resulting in longer hardware lifetime on average.