Linux

Yes of course it’ll work fine.

I use a third gen i5 laptop as a daily driver and run mid-poly count cad and cam, host windows vms and do everything else but play games that people expect out of a computer (no time for games nowadays).

Look into installing more ram and ssds in the old desktops and they’ll skip along happily for another decade or until mainline kernels drop support for their instruction set. I’m running Debian and rhel (seriously look into this, they have programs to get cheap licenses into the hands of educational institutions and provide good support) but probably anything is fine, just figure out account security so kids don’t go around copy and pasting whatever stack exchanges llm suggests into bash.

E: I read the rest of the thread and there’s a lot of “this worked for my computers/this worked for me” advice. Not hating, I literally gave that exact advice myself.

Call red hat sales if you’re in the us, I guess suse sales if you’re in europe or india. They’ll most likely set you up with a pilot program license and if not they’ll walk you through the process of creating one or two accounts to work around the “ten free machines but then you gotta pay” limitation.

You’ll be able to sell it to administration as “this program gets students in the drivers seat of the systems used for stem research, ai and android development for minimal upgrade cost and no new units. Developing familiarity with these systems will give students who pursue those studies a tangible advantage over their peers.”

If you have coworkers in computer education or it, sell it to them as a path to get more certs at a reduced or nonexistent cost (red hat and suse have their own cert programs that they use for training like ms and cisco do).

Good luck!