My father actually has an old laptop with Ubuntu that he uses exclusively to use its dvd drive; which is something he can't do with his Macbook Air. And he's about as clumsy with computers as you can imagine. I set up that laptop when the windows installation that came with it became so slow and obsolete that connecting it to the internet was just downright dangerous and irresponsible. The free update to windows 10 failed with some weird errors and after that, I just put Ubuntu on it and it was fine. My mother also used another old laptop with Ubuntu that was no longer usable with Windows on it right until she got her first iPad (which is awesome for people like her). The only application she ever used on that laptop was a browser. However, since she got her first iPad, she's the biggest Apple fan girl ever. And with good reason. They are very usable for people like her.

However, for people with old crappy windows laptops, installing Linux on them is usually a massive upgrade. Hardware support can be an issue sometimes but mostly the old stuff is supported well enough. And it's not like getting a cheap new laptop with only 4GB is going to help people like that a lot in terms of performance. Crappy hardware like that is better with Linux on it.

I switched out my own mac book pro for a linux laptop a few weeks ago. The mac broke and I needed a replacement urgently and the shiny new M1s were a combination of expensive and unobtainable in a hurry. So, I opted not to put money in getting an Intel based obsolete on day 1 replacement and picked up the cheapest windows laptop with 16GB I could find at a local store instead (700 Euro).

I dutifully sat through the windows onboarding, which is ridiculously horrible these days. Just endless questions, nagging, and waiting. What a load of crap. After it finally activated, I rebooted it in disgust with a Manjaro USB stick, wiped the disk and I haven't looked back since.

I've dabbled with linux on servers, in vms, and as a dual boot thing since the nineties (Slackware in 1995) but never really committed to using it full time as my primary driver until a few weeks ago. But it was always an option for me. I do mostly server and a bit of frontend development and spend a lot of time on the command line.

All the development tools I use professionally are open source and actually run best on Linux. I've not used Microsoft Office since 2012, which is the last time I worked as an employee for a big corporation. These days, I do all my office stuff in a browser. Google Docs is good enough for me. Gmail & calendar work fine as well. I have zero need for native software for that stuff. I guess, if I ever needed it, I could use Microsoft Office 365 in a browser as well. In addition to that, I installed a variety of snap applications (slack, vs code, etc.).

For photography, I've been using Darktable for several years on my mac and that of course works great on my new Linux laptop. If you are not familiar, it compares quite nicely with Adobe Lightroom in the sense that Darktable has way more features and capabilities. It's the opposite of Gimp vs Photoshop. The Darktable UX has gotten loads better with recent versions and its masking tools are fantastic. And it's a tool designed by photographers for photographers so it makes no compromises on quality. Lead developer Aurelian Pierre is doing some commercial work as a photographer and he is a hard core color theory and tone mapping nerd.

And best of all, Steam works great on Manjaro and a lot of games that no longer worked on my mac are now usable again. It was really easy to set up and to my surprise Intel's Iris XE isn't half bad as a GPU and unlike my mac book pro, there is no thermal throttling. I was not expecting this laptop to be this good. This is the best laptop I've had since I got my 2012 mac book pro. And it only cost me 700 Euro.