Third party would most likely make things better but there’s no guarantee it would help in the situation you’ve set up. If two of the parties are fine with an actual Nazi in the White House and between them they control over half the votes then we’re still in the same situation.

My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I’m not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

I bought a Grandstream GWN7660 last year and it seems pretty good, it replaced a ubiquity WAP that I still have legacy devices connected to.