Fun fact: if you run a newer kernel version on old hardware you will get better performance than running a kernel from when the hardware was released. It pains me when people run some old version of Debian on a 25 year old laptop. It is best to run something current.
It depends. On older devices there isn't much testing of newer versions of the kernel so they can be more broken than older version.
Case in point, recently on an old laptop (~12 years) I noticed video performance was really bad which I later found out was due to modern distros defaulting to the iHD intel graphics driver. But iHD is only supported from 5th gen (Broadwell) onward. So, on older devices anything depending on the graphics driver for hardware acceleration (like video decode) fails and falls back to software rendering.
Haven't Debian and most other distros stopped supporting "i386" for quite a while now? I remember reading something like that, but they still have 32-bit isos up.
You want Bazzite. It's a Fedora based atomic distribution designed for gaming. Pain in the ass to install any app that isn't flatpacked, but it makes gaming super easy. It works on handheld and on desktop.
I'll be running 10 until I have to switch to Linux. I'd switch now but I can barely be asked to take the trash can out, let alone set up all my stuff again.
I am also on this sinking titanic. I'll probably have to dual boot win10/Linux just for Nvidia related work and maybe gaming too. Not really looking forward to all that, but it's fast approaching like they say.
I kept usin Win7 way past after Microsoft stopped supporting. It was only when Steam stopped working that I switched to Linux. That's just on my gaming PC though. My daily driver is running on MacOS.