In 2010 you mined bitcoin on a normal desktop. Not as a hobby flex, as an actual way to accumulate coins. Then GPUs made CPUs pointless, FPGAs made GPUs a side project, and around 2013 ASICs ended the whole idea of a home miner competing with anyone. The hashrate graph went vertical and the average person's hardware stopped mattering.
What's strange in hindsight is how short the open period was. From the first block to mining being an industrial activity is about three years. Everything after that is specialization: machines built for exactly one algorithm, in warehouses, buying power at contract rates you and I will never get.
That history has one visible consequence today. The protocol never changed, so a miner from 2010 and a miner from this year validate the same blocks with the same rules. The economics got brutal, the consensus layer stayed frozen. That's why an address format from fifteen years ago still works on hardware from last week, and why nothing you generate today will be invalid next year.
If you still want a machine humming for you, the honest math: at home you mine altcoins nobody trades, sell them for less than the electricity bill, and keep the machine mostly for the principle. That's fine, it's just not what the word mining meant in 2011.