Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

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Try Ubuntu (or whatever Linux you enjoy, it's just that Ubuntu is mostly hand-off for 5 years), I just bought a ~6 y/o laptop for my brother, a Fujitsu Lifebook E736 (introduced in 2016), 512 GB hard drive, 8 GB ram, some Corei5 CPU 150 eur, I did put a new battery in it. Works like a charm, 0 complaints.

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.

[0]: https://tweakers.net/laptops/aanbod/

I'm surprised there aren't more suggestions to ditch the windows install totally and go with a Linux distro like Ubuntu. Personally I also know of family members that get on very well with chromebooks

I agree, but the biggest obstacle is still hardware compatibility. Any device you buy out there that plugs into a computer will work with Windows. They might not work with Ubuntu or even have been tested with Ubuntu (so even the manufacturer might not know whether it's compat).

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.

During the pandemic I used what I had to hand, I chucked Fedora on a Vostro 3750 (which was my old dev laptop years ago so had an SSD and 16GB of RAM) and the thing was perfectly acceptable for all his schooling, youtube stuff, since that model was a 17" battleship desktop replacement it was perfect for him with an external keyboard and mouse .

I would honestly just move right on to Linux Mint. If they're familiar with Windows, they will be right at home with the Cinnamon DE.

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.

I use Fujitsu since a long time at home (3 notebooks, 1 workstation). I think Fujitsu has almost none bloatware. For me the reason, why I buy this (a bit expensive) brand .. and Linux does work mostly well too.

My mother has a gas meter in her home, which requires a usb device to be plugged into her laptop to load value on to this device which is then plugged into the meter and transfers the value. It is not compatible with anything but Windows.

So a gas company can force you to get a Windows PC?

arguably just force you to use windows. you could possibly go to a neighbor or library or something, but.. well.. a library would probably lock down random usb drives being put in or random software to manage gas meter accounts. and ... your neighbor may not want to share because you'd have access to their meter info as well (assuming you could even do that)... so... yeah...

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