Official Windows 11 Pro license can be bought for as low as €3 
Windows 11 is not supported on old computers. Those who say their computer can only run Windows 7, can 100% upgrade to Linux and run latest Firefox with all features. There is no excuse to use old, broken and slow Windows 7
I have an old computer running Windows 10 and it is terribly slow. Not upgradeable to Win 11 because of TPM and or CPU requirements. The same computer performed decently with Windows 7. So what actually is broken is Win 10+.
Windows 7 works much faster and it's much more responsive. When I click something, it reacts immediately without any stupid delays, like in Windows 11. Probably because it doesn't have tons of built-in sh*t, like telemetry, bloatware, unneeded services and so on. And it has 100+ times better interface.
I feel freedom and a breath of fresh air, when using it.
These artifical "requirements" can be quite easily ignored. At least until 24H2. But I don't even tried to upgrade higher than 23H2, because there are even more bloatware...
It will fly with linux. If you are afraid, try something like PopOS!, very easy to use, install takes like 3 minutes, no complicated questions at all. Latest COSMIC desktop environment is very cool too. Windows 7 is slow, if you compare 
I would like to point out that with Windows 7 and VMware I can run anything released after, even Windows 11, and ignoring games and 3D graphics, I challenge you to notice the difference between the simulated system and the real one... Above all, with the Unity function, applications can be launched from the main operating system, even if they are not supported...
Fact of the matter is that W7 is EOL. Won’t / can/t be supported. Just off the top of my head, TLS2.1 (Nevermind TLS3) is already a no go on W7.
Maybe try Windows XP instead.
... given a powerful enough hardware ...
The issues are with low specs hardware, particularly netbooks and notebooks originally shipped with WIndows 7 tend to be not powerful enough (either CPU or Ram amount, or both) to run Windows 10, let alone 11 (after having worked around the artificial limitations such as TPM).
Linux is not - generally speaking - particularly suitable for those devices either as current "main" distributions are CPU and RAM hungry as well (though more "niche" distros do exist, suitable for less powered hardware).
Yep, as said, I am using Supermium browser on XP to access this forum no problems, but likely XP won't run "properly" on the mentioned netbooks and notebooks originally shipped with windows 7 because of lack of drivers.
Aside from the fact that it is TLS 1.2 and that it can be enabled with an official Microsoft patch, the other is TLS 1.3, etc.
As I was writing on previous post, with virtualization, it supports ANYTHING that doesn't require a specific processor instruction that can't be simulated.
I myself no longer personally use WinXP or 7, etc., but the point isn't that I want to insist on using old OSes,
but when you WORK WITH THEM, you're sometimes forced to do so, because some hardware or software costs tens of thousands of euros, and you have to buy them again if you want the version compatible with the latest OS...
#RunUNIX
Switched to linux in 2010.. Just do it.
Don’t go for the weird distributions at the start, just start with linux mint if you are a beginner.
Install is super easy, it just works.
As for discourse… looks bad, sucks to navigate, scroll and read. It was supposed to be better and not crash but it still happens all the time. Forum layouts were perfected 20 years ago when vbulletin was the standard.
They kept devolving since then.
Discourse looks good if your browser supports javascript and you are not a keyboard-first user. I agree, it can probably be slower on old machines, but it solved all our issues we had with phpbb. Now we get zero spam. With phpbb we got sometimes hundreds of spam messages per day, and none of the plugins and captchas could stop it. We were also be able to use modern databases, redundancy and load balancing, so forum can no longer be DDoSed by just anyone (like before).
I won't comment...
Honestly speaking, even "unsupported browser" appearance looks better. Just because it has clear contrast colors, and it even has the ability to go to previous/next page, instead of infinite scrolling.
So I need to install an unsupported browser to get this minimalistic and UX friendly looks? Or is there a theme switch for it?
turn off javascript, many sites benefit from it there are Waterfox plugins that do it per-site.