my common suggestion for people looking to switch is throw linux on your last laptop if its in working condition and see how well it runs vs your newer one with windows.

People talk a lot about software enshittification, but hardware enshittification is also a thing!

We need to keep old hardware alive and avoid e-waste when possible. What is your computer?

My wife’s upgraded 2012 MacBook Pro is nicknamed the beast as it’s so snappy running Fedora Workstation.

My 2013 Dell XPS laptop is still running beautifully with Fedora 43 too! Honestly, it's amazing how much life a piece of old hardware can have with Linux running on it.

Hell yeah! I'm typing this on a 2013 i7 Macbook air running LMDE 13 and it runs like a dream.

Hello from Fedora Silverblue 43 on a 2009 HP Z600 workstation. Can't believe how smoothly GNOME runs on this thing.

Hello from late 2013 MacBook Pro with NixOS

Fedora + GNOME my beloved <3

My daily driver is a 2014 i5 machine with 4GB RAM, running Fedora 43 Sway (riced but no animations).

It can simultaneously run Emacs, Librewolf 6-8 tabs (research), Helium 2-3 tabs (for email, calendar & cloud drive) and 1-2 desktop chat apps. If I flick on Freetube at this point, it'll freeze up.

I've got a pretty minimalist approach to work so I don't have too many things running most of the time. I use mostly system packages and Flatpaks sparingly. I can keep running this thing as my daily driver for a few more years.

Also stick a 27" display and a pair of 5" powered studio speakers into it in the evenings to enjoy some movie streaming.

ps: I've recently configured another 12GB of virtual memory (?) on the SSD to support the 4GB RAM on the machine and that has significantly helped with multitasking.

ps2: Sharing the above to encourage to try Linux out. I came to this with zero knowledge amd experience. Really amazing what's possible.

ps3: May be also good to mention that if first ran Linux Mint (with no optimisations or modifications) on this machine and only moved to Fedora a year later. Both distros worked flawlessly. If anybody is keen to know why I moved from Linux Mint to Fedora, please ask and I will share my experience.

I'm running Nobara on a 2015 MacBook Pro, nice that this laptop I bought over a decade ago is still a perfectly good machine. The display, trackpad, keyboard and aluminum chassis are still stop notch and the processor and ram handle my casual computer usage just fine. Wild to think how many perfectly good computers are just going to waste because Apple and Microsoft gave up on them.

Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.

The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.

The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.

Aside from one desktop that still has Win 7 Pro on it for various reasons, and is almost entirely an internal server, every single system I use is Linux. Has been this way for at least a decade. My current laptop came with Winblows 11 but I booted first time straight into a Kubuntu flash drive to install it. Never even had to see that ugly ass Winblows.

I’ve got something running Pop, one running Debian, one has Elementary, I’ve got one with Bodhi, another with KDE Neon, one with Q4, and a variety of others.

Fuck Winblows the OS that is one giant virus.

Edit: oooh forgot my little guy running Kali. And also the dozen distros running in VMs on the Windows desktop.

My employer offered to upgrade my many-years-old Thinkpad to a newer one, but it just did not stick (WiFi drivers in Linux were unstable). I returned it and kept using the old one. Why change what works.

Well my 25$ Value Village SFF PC works well after about 100$ of upgrades, including a i7 and 32GB of RAM (bought last year)...

I've been throwing Linux onto fresh SSDs for a bit now. Main issue with old laptops is all the different chargers. USBC laptop charging is really the best.

Planning to give the non USBC to family members.

To compare...

We're running brand new Dell laptops with Windows 11 and most are failing.

Some are hardware issues (laptop won't charge!) Some are software (BSOD, random issues, etc)

So, TBH, I'd like to buy back all our old laptops, replace Windows with Linux and do away with all the corp. spyware and I bet my team's productivity doubles.