The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
Elementary OS didn't work for me (broke during install -- people online said it was video drivers), and on mint and Ubuntu gaming wasn't working exactly right. In pop os 85% of my games run though
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.