Win11 requires a gen8 or later intel chip and a similarly modern AMD chip in order to support the level of security (and backdoors) required. There isn't any other reason for this requirement, even chips from twenty years ago can run Win10. Gen7 isn't that old, if you bought a new PC as little as four years ago you could have gen7 and be unable to run Win11.

Thanks to Valve and their work on Proton, you can run almost every modern game on Linux. And you could already run older games on the platform. Standard office software is also no longer tied to Windows, what with everything being web based anymore.

It really might be time to end that thirty-year relationship with Microsoft. I'm certainly not going to spend hundreds on new hardware in order to continue it when that hardware is not dramatically better than what I've already got. My primary gaming pc is gen4 and still hasn't hit the wall yet thanks to video cards being the real bottleneck for gaming and the tech underlying and supporting those hasn't changed dramatically since PCIe was introduced in the mid 2000s.