> Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.
Ok, you're right, it's irrelevant to a discussion about the OS; the point I was trying to make is that this old machine is robust, it can be taken apart, completely, and screwed back together, and still work fine. Not all machines can do that.
But that's not inherently some property of it being an old machine. One could have an ancient machine where that's nearly impossible to do with proprietary fan sizes and headers and have a machine built yesterday which is easy to do.
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.