These are product for certain type of people. I could’ve been that person maybe 10 years ago, or whenever I thought compiling Gentoo on a Pentium 4 was worth my time. But as I got busier with life, that opinion changed. To have to pay for a product that “mostly” works? (That doesn’t really once you read more details about it)
Yeah, that's probably why GP was compiling Gentoo on it ten years later: By then it had become a little too tired for Windows, but still quite viable with a crisp Linux distro on it. In case you thought you saw some discrepancy there, I think you're mistaken.
