I'm writing this on an AMD Phenom II, running Debian and StumpWM, that's over 10 years old. I've upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, and the memory from 8 Gb to 16 Gb (4 Gb DIMMs were very expensive when I first built it) and it's as fast as can be.
My work computer is much newer, has twice as much memory and a newer Intel processor, and I really can't tell the difference except for CPU bound tasks that run for a long time, like compiling large projects.
Have to voice my agreement. Linux is an expensive investment but so very much worth it. Each time my colleagues complain about their computers it is because of Windows. I count myself lucky to have Linux as my only desktop and the skill to maintain it. I run an ancient i5 2500k with 8GB RAM and SSD. All the games I play work fine on Steam Proton. I still have to figure out how in the world Reddit on Firefox manages to completely lock the system up, with looping audio and frozen cursor. Nothing else causes that fault.
> I still have to figure out how in the world Reddit on Firefox manages to completely lock the system up, with looping audio and frozen cursor. Nothing else causes that fault.
Fellow X220 user here... a solution for this exact problem where the system runs out of memory and then you sit there staring and waiting until it churns around long enough until it can do stuff again is to run earlyoom[0].
It will kill off the firefox process (or whichever is the main memory hog) early, which is also annoying but less so than having to wait minutes until you can use your computer again.
My previous two laptops came with Windows installed, it was XP and Win7, which I happily used for a year or two, until despite my best efforts, the whole system got crudded and slow, and at some point a teensy crashy or maybe I got a virus and that's when I put Linux on the thing. That easily gave the device a few more years of useful life. (my current laptop also came with windows, but I just backed up the factory image, wiped and installed Linux right away).
Anyway, while every version[0] of Windows I have used has become inescapably crudded up and slower over time, on Linux, even the old laptop, the only thing that got slower over time was the web browser. Which has mostly to do with webpages becoming heavier.
[0] Actually win95 cause I can't remember if this also happened on win 3.11 and the like.
I don't feel like linux is expensive investment for everyone.
I am a first year CS student. when I got my first laptop recently, I got crazy and installed debian (had some prior experience with command line), it didn't work very well for laptop. All DEs except enlightenment (yeah i even tried it) had lots of display related glitches due to cheap hardware.
Then I moved on and installed fedora. Nothing to tweak from CLI. Just changed few settings from GUI and peace of mind even on relatively obscure hardware.
It has been vastly simplified and worth it for anyone in IT / CS related fields.
I'm writing this on an AMD Phenom II, running Debian and StumpWM, that's over 10 years old. I've upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, and the memory from 8 Gb to 16 Gb (4 Gb DIMMs were very expensive when I first built it) and it's as fast as can be.
My work computer is much newer, has twice as much memory and a newer Intel processor, and I really can't tell the difference except for CPU bound tasks that run for a long time, like compiling large projects.