Funny how we are gradually surrounded by what we might consider has e-waste, while in reality we are just witnessing the end of commercial viability.
Take this Macbook Air for instance: this is a 2012 model, with just an i5, 8gb RAM and 250gb SSD. Forget running macOS on this thing. I mean, if you really wanted to you could but this thing can go up to 10.15 Catalina, released 5 years ago now; definitely a no go from a security standpoint. Let alone that performs kinda bad on this machine.
Ok then you really really wanted to run macOS you could go down the route of Open Core Legacy, meaning that you have to flash the BIOS, flash a USB stick with a patched version of macOS, etc etc, just to end up with a sub-optimal experience as several new feature in macOS require hardware acceleration and what not (in short all the stuff that kinda give you the idea of a snappy and fluid system), and which you will simply not have on a machine that old. So again, you could run it if you really really wanted it, but the result could disappoint you depending on the hardware you have in your hands.
So what now? You could of course buy a new model, which would support all the bells and whistles or you could try to flash a Linux distro like i did here.
Of course you could technically flash anything on this laptop, may that be Arch, Fedora, Debian (which I did try successfully) or whatever have you but, for I was not in the mood for tinkering with the OS that much, and found out that Mint LMDE (Debian edition) was literally mind blowing. E V E R Y T H I N G worked straight out of the box, wifi drivers, keyboard backlight, webcam and so on. And this machine suddenly feels fast! Unbelievably fast!
What a great way to resurrect a laptop, which essentially can still serve some purpose, like writing this article here on my dear markdown editor, feed it to VSCodium, commit to GitHub, and posted on this blog.