except the time is spent learning something instead of waiting for the pc to update(or you can, of course, use one of the many common distros that require no time to understand, eg. linux mint, fedora, tuxedoOS etc)

It used to be the case yea, but my experience last 5 years or so has been that especially for old hardware everything works out of the box.

Might be extremely hardware or distro dependent though.