I gave several early gen i7 new life with SteamOS. More or less sets up nicely and could play a surprising number games in my library. One of the problems with giving away boxes to family/friends is the OS was worth more than the hardware and this really helps. The normal Linux desktop was a bit harder to get up and running (xterm, of all things, does not work by default) but with a browser and my normal dev tools all more or less work once you get the repos set up.