There is a lot of confusion / misunderstandings here.
I'm going to correct a few comments with definitive information. Not my opinion; but empirically verifiable:
#1. There is now a somewhat simple way to get around the Win-11 compatibility requirements so that essentially 95% of the PC's that can run Win10, can run the current version of Win11 (this will likely be fixed in the future and it's not a very good idea to run on old hardware for this, as well as many other reasons). To be clear, this has existed for over a month, there is nothing to wait for.
#2. Windows 11 is a HELL of a lot more than just "eye candy". I'm sure that it appears to be just eye-candy to people that are not familiar with the underlying changes; however -- make no mistake, there is a LOT more going on, unrelated to "eye candy". Like every major Windows release, the eye-candy is the least significant portion of the upgrade.
With that said -- I would never recommend anyone run Win11 on either a new OR old machine. Win 10 LTSC (and better, some of the optimized "slim" versions of Win 10 LTSC) are, by far, the most performant. Combine this with Simplewall and a debloater of your choice, and you have the best/lightest option you can get for new OR old PC's (Windows is exceptionally dynamic and runs very differently on old/low RAM PC's, therefore, a good lightweight distro is better for both fast and slow PC's equally).
#3. Quote "a Quad Core could hold its own." This is absolutely untrue. An 11th gen quad-core runs about 20x the speed of a 4th gen quad-core, for example. You can't determine performance by the number of cores, without knowing which architecture it was built on.
#4. If you really want to play with Win11, you're better-off installing Hyper-V in Win10 LTSC. Because Hyper-V is a tier-1 hypervisor, your guest machines (eg Win11 distro) will run nearly as fast as if they were native (about 3% performance hit, or less on CPU/disk performance). Hyper-V takes almost no time to install. You don't have to be technical in the least. Just make sure you have the Win-11 ISO (adapted for Win10 hardware support), point it at the ISO, and go. Within 30 minutes you'll have Hyper-V running, plus a Win11 machine that you can quickly dump/reset if you screw something up ๐