If you keep forgetting them for another ~15-25 more years they might have value in the retro space.

I'm between living locations and can't carry my desktop around.

So I grabbed an old laptop and put Linux mint on it. It's been near perfect. Extremely smooth experience.

It detected my printer and auto installed. I installed steam and played Terraria without issue. Small performance problem but I don't have a GPU. Even works good with my docking station.

My only complaint is the audio device doesn't switch automatically when I dock/undock.

I'd recommend making a USB and boot into it for a test drive.

I end up with all the "broken" laptops my family replaces after they buy new ones.

I've got like 9 laptops. Active ones are my Linux one, work one (windows 11) and my wife's school one (windows 11). We both have win 10 desktops still.

I've been a full time dev since 2012 and needed a Mac, I had barely used windows over that time but beforehand ran a PC service business.

Anyway, Ive been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 6 months for reasons.

... The other day I got a new cheap laptop I needed to setup for run a single application.

Holy fuck what a shitshow.

It took me 2 hours just to get to the desktop. Shit didn't work, bullshit login screens, ads everywhere.

It was a massive pile of dog shit.

After battling to get the system setup for the rest of the day I gave up, chucked Fedora Kinoite On it... Took 30 minutes from creating boot media to getting a desktop going, chucked the app I needed to run in a Flatpack, chucked it on a USB, and it was up and running.

No bullshit.

Just works.

Truly the year of the Linux desktop.

It's not all quite as rosy.

Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it's much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.

But it's also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.

For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can't sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn't work.

Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it's not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn't want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it's played on a different PC.

Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it's also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.

If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.

If you want to do anything else and don't have any technical skills and/or don't want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can't fully recommend it.

Whilst that's true, it's a good opportunity to push Linux as a potential alternative in a few different ways - reduction of e-waste, free and private oriented alternative, simple (in some situations/distro) for certain basic users, or even someone who wants to get a little more technical. It's good to promote the idea that there is more to computers than a monolithic monopoly called Microsoft.

Pretty sure the template would work fine with OnlyOffice.

I am a developer and Linux is my native environment in production systems. I wanted to use Linux on my laptop but sleeping / waking up never worked well enough. It could not switch from integrated video card to a discrete one ending up always using the discrete one which drained the battery in 30 minutes. All in all, it was usable but the details didn't work so I gave up. That was years ago and eversince no customer really allows Linux...

I had a look and it looks like you will not get anything special. The cutoff is around 2015. So for example Lenovo T440s will support Win11 but T440p will not. Looking at backmarket T440s is cheaper than T440p. So looks like you will only be able to get something ancient and the price will be pretty standard.

I'm guessing the cheap laptop was running Windows? You didn't mention, it sounds at first like you're saying you were using Linux on it.

What ads were everywhere? Why did it "take 2 hours to get to the desktop" - you mean, that's how long it took to install or something?

I just rebuilt mine and can confirm that most of those resume template builders utilize a lot of word doc "hacks" to format everything, and loading and LibreOffice breaks it.

If one were to run Win10 Enterprise LTSC IoT, "activated"... would it continue to automatically receive updates?

Fucking phone systems! That's what these are, and we have to snap them any time they're rebooted because sometimes they just shut the bed randomly, but the client doesn't want to buy a new system....

But, it's their wallet and they're willing to pay the "fuck you pay me" legacy surcharge.

Awesome, thanks for the insight. I was actually looking at Linux Mint myself. I need around 4Gb on a USB to boot it, correct?

Shadow retirement fund

Nat is not a security feature.

Just use ipv6

No, no its not. I get it lemmy has a hard on for Linux and libreoffice. But unfortunately its just not gonna happen windows is king. If you like or not its the main dog on the market and enterprises are not going to switch.

People here so full of shit. I just reimaged my lenovo t570 with windows 11 took less then 10mins to install. Another 5 to remove all the bs built in software like solitaire Cortana etc and then another 10-15 to apply all windows updates. Bam done.

That might do it. I don't own anything smaller than 16 GB sticks. I used Rufus on windows to make my stick.

With a couple of governments making the switch I honestly think that things are changing to some degree. Will windows die and be forgotten by everyone overnight? Of course not. But I think there’s a real chance their piece of the pie will start to shrink noticeably. Chrome OS is dominating in schools for a few years now and Microsoft is seemingly trying hard to alienate the current windows users.