The adage about 'linux brings old hardware back to life' is now false when it comes to games. I remember Mikee complaining about this a few years back but it's reached near full saturation at this point. Free software games have pretty much abandoned OpenGL 2 support, so any old c2d laptops are not playing any modern updates to games. OpenGL 3+ will never run on these chipsets so MESA won't try. I recently faced this fact trying to run OpenRA on an old c2d laptop for LAN purposes and was left agasp by this: https://www.openra.net/news/playtest-20200329/
>We note that OpenGL 3.2 or OpenGL ES 3 are now required. Moving away from OpenGL 2 is important for future compatibility with modern rendering APIs (Vulkan/Metal). This does unfortunately mean dropping support for some older systems (typically 10+ years old) that currently can run OpenRA, but we believe that this is a necessary tradeoff for the future.
I was then surprised trying to run a few other 2d games on this hardware, it really does seem the community are abandoning old hardware.