Within a few months of her using it she complained it’s slow, takes ages to turn on etc. After removing almost everything from the manufacturer it was usable. But even now she barely uses the machine and never installs anything and it’s unusable slow with essentially zero usage after a couple of years. She’s not even ran any updates. It wouldn’t surprise me if these machines are built to die.
But, to be honest, the guy that sold it put some super bare Win10 on it and that also felt pretty fast.
In any event, for email and web-browsing I think Ubuntu is just perfect. I have it on our HTPC and the whole family uses it without thinking twice. And it stays fast.
Oh, our family laptop (the one the kids use, and I do on occasion) is a Dell Latitude E5450, first introduced in 2015(!), I got it 2nd hands in 2019, it looked barely used. I put Ubuntu on it (but recently I installed Arch, when I regularly use a machine myself I prefer it), the thing still feels like a fast new laptop, the kids went through Covid with it, using Teams (for Linux) and doing online homework. I use it for dev work on the side. Love the machine.
My advice: Get a second hand business model from a good source (some local trader that gets good reviews, or you can visit, we have a lot of local IT people gathering on a website here that sell older business hardware [0, Dutch website]). Plus, it's nice to give stuff a second life instead of buying cheap throw-away shitware for cheap.
Having said that, many devices just need to sync with your phone and not computer, so there's maybe less of an issue than before. For example, my bike computer doesn't need to be Win compat since it syncs with an app on my phone.
I'm really impressed with this distro and use it as my own daily driver. One of the few times where I do very little tweaking to get the UI/UX just right for my own preferences.