If you bought your computer after 2010, there’s most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.
Installing an operating system may sound difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. With any luck, there are people in your area ready to help!
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“Borrowed” a Dell Latitude E6420 from work, put Fedora 42 KDE on it. Boots faster than my assigned laptop with Win11. Also put modded Minecraft on it for shits and giggles and it runs suprisingly well (can’t crank everything up though, of course). Worse case, will probs turn it into a server. Best case, it’s still a legit good laptop for light workloads.
Best of all, it took maybe 15 minutes to get it set up. No tinkering, no Cortana during setup, just straight install and go. There’s 0 reason to stick with Windows now. There are free/open-source alternatives for anything you may use.
If you really want to pay for something, donate to the great devs of all these great projects!
I just convinced my mom to try a bargain bin laptop that was great 6 years ago, with a fresh install of linux mint. Now I have another family member that wants the same thing.
Interesting, I might have a 15 year old laptop somewhere, wonder how usable it still is
I daily drive a 13 year old laptop with middling (at the time) specs. I’m sure it would be fine
If it’s on a 64bit architecture, it probably can still run Linux Mint somewhat smoothly. If it’s 32bit though, best you can do is probably make it a homeserver with archlinux32 or some other silly hack.
Pra quem conseguir contribuir traduzindo o site, já seria de bastante ajuda. Dá pra ver mais aqui, mas até o momento eu só achei 1 lugar de instalação brasileiro no site.
Does Linux now not break the graphics driver on every update like 20 years ago?
Not trolling, honest inquiry. I’m done with that command line bullshit.
Switched about a year ago. Linux is surprisingly plug and play these days. So far installed Mint on two systems: 15 years old laptop with Nvidia GPU, 10 years old desktop with AMD GPU. Also have a new built gaming PC with Bazzite. Now I do 100% of my gaming on linux.
I dont think I used the terminal twice and everything just works. Unless you have some niche hardware switching should be a piece of cake.
Thanks for the reply.
It may, depending on what flavor of Linux you end up running. There are a lot of them and even the “better” ones are better at specific things. Some are great at running forever without ever needing to restart your computer, others might be better at handling the newest or oldest hardware out there.
So, yes, Linux is definitely good and stable enough to provide you the experience you expect from an OS, but it doesn’t mean that any Linux will be like that.
If you don’t want to deal with the command line, I recommend a distro from Ublue: Bluefin/Aurora for a general purpose OS, or Bazzite for something pre-configured with tools that improve support for games and windows apps.
UBlue distros are good at giving you something that just works and you won’t ever need to mess with the terminal or config files unless you’re trying to add more stuff to the OS, as opposed to just trying to tinker with what’s already there (in fact by default it doesn’t even let you modify a lot of config files that other distros might often suggest you do)
I’m running Ubuntu and the graphics driver has been fine.
Been using linux exclusively for at least 5 years, as the main OS for 10 years. The only time I remember the graphics driver breaking by itself, without me trying to do something dumb, was some 8 years ago with Ubuntu. This is not a problem anymore, with either Debian- or Arch-based distros.
