[crb3]

Commenting to something said within the linked article: 32-bit Devuan (with Trinity Desktop aka KDE3.5 on maintenance) is still available at http://exegnulinux.net/ with Devuan/Debian repos. I'm happily running that on a Core2 Duo laptop.

[cassepipe]

IIRC correctly from my Late 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook days, that cpu can handle a 64 bits OS (although in my case the EFI could not so you had to modify it in order to be able to boot a 64bits OS)

[crb3]

The laptop is a Gateway MX8711. I tried the Exe-Gnu 64bit live-USB and it refused to boot, so I shrugged and booted it into the 32bit flavor. Inherent or model-specific (or offended at only having 2G DRAM to play in), it wasn't worth my time to chase down why, not for an ancilliary machine.

[asveikau]

By 2007, the remaining 32 bit only Intel CPUs that I can think of were the Atoms made for netbooks.

[asystole]

I'm always curious - what do you use that machine for? I'm imagining most of the modern web is unusable.

[crb3]

Browsing is slow but not that unusable. firefox-esr is in the repos; I prefer palemoon but I'll take what I can get. Gnumeric is faster than LO; both are in the repos. The Broadcom blobs for that Gateway machine are sadly out of date, so I yanked the wifi module out entirely; ethernet works fine, though in most cases I use it landlocked. The editor I prefer (jstar) is TUI, so I mostly work out of xterms.

Use-cases? Remote and while-you-wait work, RS232 and ethernet test console. It's bigger than a netbook but it's what I've got, so I lug it around.

[cassepipe]

Not OP but I had a Late 2007 Core 2 Duo with 4G ram that could hold its own 3 years ago.

It was not comfortable but definitely usable (unlike a 2005 Imac G5 for example).

A 2013 4th gen i5 laptop with a SSD (major difference in trems of experience) and 8GB Ram remains totally usable for regular stuff (watching movies, Youtube, browsing the web, basic dev work) The plastic body is generally what fails before everything else.

As long you have at least four cores, 4GB Ram, linux and above all a SSD you should be fine

[PrimeMcFly]

A core 2 duo should still browse the modern web just fine. More than enough CPU power for all but the most JS intensive pages.