Or suppressed. I’ll give some anecdotal examples. I have a friend that lives in a major metropolitan area with over 2.6 million people. When he applied to get a photo ID (he lost his previous one and needed a new one), the soonest appointment available for the entire metropolitan area was 3 months out. That’s just for the appointment to apply for the ID, not actually receiving the ID. You are required to have a photo ID to vote. Then, voter registration in itself must also be completed at least a month before an election. Now, let’s talk about the process of actually voting. I’ve personally stood in line for over 6 hours to vote. A lot of the people waiting in line had to leave to pick up their kids and other things. If you don’t pick up your kids from school or daycare at very specific times, there are serious penalties. While I was waiting, there must have been at least 40 people in front of me that had to leave before voting. Many of them had waited in line for over 4 hours. For most people, waiting in line is the only way to vote. Only the elderly and disabled qualify to vote by mail. Make no mistake, voter suppression is very effective, and it is implemented specifically in areas that vote against what the ruling party wants. In Trump leaning areas, the lines were no longer than a two minute wait if they existed at all. Trump never would have won either election if it wasn’t for voter suppression.

Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you’ve got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that’s what matters.

Keep in mind you’re not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.

That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn’t work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.

One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.

The first half of the 2000s was a lot better for Linux gaming than the second half. That time period after game companies stopped releasing anything for Linux but before Wine became realistically usable was very dark.