>>327I know OP has probably gone by now, but I'm having pretty good progress with running VNs on gentoo with wine - if anything is picky, you can just use kvm for a quick xp set up to run it on anyway.
I'm actually in a similar position to OP too, I've a shitty laptop that benefits a fuck ton from an optimised os.
I'd put up a list of all the stuff I've managed to get working, but winehq already does that, really - just torrent everything and try them if you've a decent connection.