you can do this with any pc as long as none of the parts have issue in a linux distro. There's no need to go out of your way to use a piece of crap.

I used to browse hackaday for days on end when I was a kid but "here's a guy that installed a linux distro on hardware that he didn't expect to work and it worked" isn't the tier of article that drew me in back then, and is also a couple decades behind the curve for that kind of linux news.