That's really not true, I ran each of my "Windows" laptops for 6 years; a Toshiba from 2011-2017 and a Asus UX430UA from 2017 to this year. Bought a MSI GF65 Thin for a GPU, I refreshed Windows and installed only what was necessary and removed dead files/services, with constant HW health monitoring as long as I could; then migrated them to Arch/Fedora with i3wm; keeping as minimal of a setup as I could.
I don't know if that qualifies as easily using hardware, but I think I am very lazy, and that was the path of minimal resistance to keep them up and running. Both those laptops are happily being used by my parents for keeping track of their finances, doing admin tasks for whatever organizations they're a part of. My father even uses them for complex SAP tasks. The only HW fault that came up was the Toshiba fan broke once and was very quickly replaced and has been working fine since. The battery is dead of course, but the Asus still gives a 2-3 hour backup if necessary.
Sorry, I misphrased that. The hardware might be fine, but the OS will not be. Re-installing windows every year is basically a must. Same for restarting every day.
Linux or OSX? Leave them running for a year and nothing changes. To be fair, my last experience with Windows was 3 years ago.
I don't know if that qualifies as easily using hardware, but I think I am very lazy, and that was the path of minimal resistance to keep them up and running. Both those laptops are happily being used by my parents for keeping track of their finances, doing admin tasks for whatever organizations they're a part of. My father even uses them for complex SAP tasks. The only HW fault that came up was the Toshiba fan broke once and was very quickly replaced and has been working fine since. The battery is dead of course, but the Asus still gives a 2-3 hour backup if necessary.