Many years ago, my mother (in her 60's) called me to tell me she had dumpster-dived an old laptop that she wanted to get working but it needed a reformat and she didn't have the Windows install media nor product key. What should she do?

I really didn't want to deal with walking her through this so in an attempt to brush her off I said: "I dunno, I guess you could install Ubuntu."

Didn't hear anything more about it for some time. Many months later I asked what happened to the laptop. She said she installed Ubuntu and it was working great.

Wait, what!?!