Took roughly three hours because meanwhile I was doing other chores and only passed by the laptop roughly every 15 minutes to enable successive stages of the updates. It passed three complete versions of the OS until it finally installed the current version.
Everything went well, the machine is running smoothly and up to date now.
It’s not like Windows would be able to run.
Any GNU/Linux distro is good
I actually just gave up on trying to put W11 LTS directly on a 17 year old PC. It booted to the USB, but it wouldn’t recognize the w8 storage driver.
I would rather put Linux on it, but I’m trying to sell it to make room for more hardware.
So far I bought 5 computers and resold all them plus a few I had in my basement.