Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop in 2026?
Give it to someone you know who needs a laptop.
Setup Proxmox and Tailscale on it so you can create VMs or containers as you need and access them from anywhere.
Setup Coolify on it. With Coolify and Cloudflare Tunnels you can self host your personal projects even behind CG-NAT.
Take it to a charity shop or thrift store near you that accepts donations of electronics so that it finds its way to some smart kid who wants to teach himself or herself about computers.
I will give it to my child for practice like AI, to create something fun
Hang on to it if it still works, and you've got a power supply. There's going to be disruptions to global trade one way or the other (Trump does insane things, OR Xi invades Taiwan) that will completely mess up the availability of CPUs, and indeed, most electronics. You may be able to sell it for a profit, or be in the top percent of computer owners in 3 years.
BTW It's a 2019 Dell Inspiron with ~2.8 GHz processor speed and 24 GB memory. It's pretty slow by today's standards. Does your recommendation still hold?
That's a very capable machine. It doesn't really matter if it's slow by today's standards. It's fine, particularly if it's not running Windows. I recently bought a couple of machines that were older and less capable than that, but were plenty good enough for what I wanted them for.
Just because a machine isn't up to the latest specs doesn't mean it's not good, or that there isn't a market for it.
Put linux mint on it. You’ll be amazed how well it runs.