I had a 2011 i5 Mac mini sitting in the closet after it stopped getting OS updates. By 2018 I figured it was long in the tooth even though I'd added more RAM and swapped the hard drive for an SSD. I pulled it out one day not too long ago, wiped the drive, and installed elementary OS and was surprised at how well it ran. I almost regret buying a new daily driver since the speed difference is barely noticable.
I think I have the same. the only thing that stops me using it more is I do a lot of threejs dev in the browser. I'm not sure if it's the GPU itself or the browser drivers which i can't update now, but it crawls. Favor - if you go to threejs.org are you able to run example sketches?
