So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.
Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.
To be fair, I recently had to switch distros for my little Atom-based server because of a similar deal:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:X86-64-Architecture-Levels#...
Granted, I only had to convert to Tumbleweed (not trivial, but easier than reinstalling), and the open source nature means there will always be lots of other alternatives, too.
Intel lists the launch date of the CPU (Atom D2500) as Q3'11, making it 14 years old when OpenSUSE Leap 16 was released.
It looks like Intel was releasing Atom CPUs without SSE4.1/4.2 up until 2013, e.g. Atom Z2420.