This article made me realize that, at my home, out of 7 full-fledged computers, that is, notebooks, servers or desktops, there's not a single X86 machine. Maybe there are a couple old dell notebooks somewhere in the garage, but I am not even sure they still boot.
The silent and really unheralded disappearance of Wintel from my home surprised me a few weeks ago as well. It wasn't a conscious decision, they just got slowly replaced by macbooks, and an ARM based NAS... etc. Kind of like how I also realized I no longer have an optical disc reader... despite still having spindles of very old stuff.
And this is kind of sad in the context of this post. Because I have always wanted to dive deeper into assembly, and there are loads of material to study X86 assembly out there.
But being able to run it only in a virtual machine, it is a little bit demotivating.
Well, there are some chinese folks selling newly built PC-XT compatible machines on the internet. Maybe I could go this way. And probably, pure, original 8086 assembly is a lot more fun than overly complicated X86_64 with lots of extensions.
If you just want to learn for the fun of it, check out RISC-V instead. It might give you that early days feeling.
There's always arm assembly. It's a differen ISA of course, but a lot of the concepts transfer pretty nicely. You could also look at something like the Zimaboard or similar machines.
I found using qemu to be quite simple and pretty decent. I guess it depends on what you are looking to do- really low level bootloader/OS type stuff or actually explore the instruction set and maybe build something useful. Learning about the BIOS interface was actually quite enlightening, but in general ARM and RISC-V is much less complex.