I apologize this is going to be a bit vague as I can’t really provide specifics at the moment, but I’ll try to do my best with what I know off the top of my head.
I recently picked up an old Dell Optiplex desktop from 2013 and refurbished it (new paste, switched out an HDD for an ssd etc) with the intent to sell it for a profit. It has no GPU, just using integrated graphics but I figured it’d be a great machine for basic web browsing and such. I figured I’d do an OEM install of Mint, but the only problem is the gui will not properly display after booting without nomodeset in the grub config. I don’t feel like that’s an ideal form for it to be in when I sell it to someone.
I’ve tried a couple different things to fix it, I made sure all the proper drivers are installed, tried i915 flags, I’m ashamed to admit it but I was turning to chatgpt for quick support and it seems to think that ivy bridge chips just don’t play nice with up to date kernels. It suggested I downgrade to mint 21.2 so I can use a 5.15 kernel which would hypothetically work. I’m out of ideas so I might give it a try I’m not super knowledgeable, but I figured I’d turn to real people before going forward with that, I’d much prefer selling something running the current release.
The CPU is a Intel i5 3470. I can provide more precise specs and information that’s helpful later when I can check. But for now I’m open to ideas if you’ve got em.


OK?
I think 2013 gear and low-end hardware can still be useful in 2026. And that it can be win-win to give old gear a new home.
But it wouldn’t be honest selling stuff that can’t physically handle what a reasonable user would expect from a PC to someone who is not capable to install an OS themselves and doesn’t understand what the limitations are.
Not too dissimilar to marketing CMR HDDs as “NAS drives”, which I hope we all agree is a scam.
And just so I don’t get misread on that part, “HD” = 720p.