I bought an ASUS laptop a few years ago. It's literally falling apart - some keys don't work, the lid won't close, the audio jack is broken, there's a dead bit in the screen (the right quarter doesn't do full color), etc.

So I bought an hp17. It had windoze 11 on it. I honestly tried to use this but decided it was hopeless. I could have regressed it to W10, but security patches have stopped, and it's projected that hackers will be targeting it. You can pay to keep the patches coming, but who knows if Microsoft will be serious on those.

You start up a corporation in your garage, get it going, it gets big, you retire. So it continues for maybe another decade then rats opportunists get control of it and run it into the ground. I reckon that's Microsoft, and there's signs HP is going also. This laptop has serious design issues (keyboard is stupid; sharp edge under my wrists; and a couple of sharp points dig into the varnish on my desk when I open the lid [I glued taller feet to the bottom]), but it's lightweight, and runs many hours on a battery charge. But I digress.

A friend made me a linux installer on a thumbdrive. Wiped windoze 100% off there and put linux mint + cinnamon on. I copied all my files over from the ASUS.

I've used linux and unix a little in the past, I'm able to get along with it (I've used probly 20 operating systems over the years). Some things linux are as good as W10, some things not as good. When there's something I don't know how to do, there are places on the net that have how-to's, and reddit has a couple of forums where you can ask a question and get help.

Or, I just do the task on the old bucket and move the results over. At first I did this much. As I learn to do more things on linux, I used the old one less. At a certain point, about 2 months in, I just stopped using the old one.

In linux:
-I got the wifi connection working, with some consternation, resolved
-I've remapped the keyboard to something more usable, but it's still stupid
-Firefox browser works good. UblockO works good.
-The scroll bars/arrows in the folder windows and in Firefox took some effort to get right.
-I've got Free Pascal working.
-Windoze "shortcuts" have a couple of equivalents in linux: "link" and "launcher". Neither works exactly right yet.
-I haven't figured out the linux equivalent for Windoze batch files yet.
-LibreOffice is so bad their programmers must be on crack. There are supposedly alternatives.
-Audacity works great. Audio editor.
-Haven't figured out how to use WINE yet. This allows you to run windoze programs in linux.

Overall, not as stressy as losing my wallet, which I also did about the same time. Credit cards, driver's license, and worst of all, library card!!

Happy Easter