I buy refurbs from Amazon, usually less that $150. Had to replace the hard drive in one out of five, they’re cheap. They all get the windows wiped anyway.
Loaded Linux Mint on one for wife after having to fix windows one-more-time. Did a backup of her home directory/folder tree to an external drive, uploaded it to the Linux Mint.
To back up the Firefox I did a backup from the bookmarks manager and an import from the bookmarks manager to the replacement machine. Everything transferred, no problems.
Showed her how to get to Firefox and her recipes/pictures/etc files. No further problems with her machine, although she forgets to turn on the printer sometimes (she’s getting better).
Wife is very happy with the performance and trouble-free operation.
I’m on FreeBSD. I like it better and I’m an old command-line dinosaur. I run X so I can have a batch of terminals open. If “command line” makes your eyeballs cage you probably don’t want to go here. I also used it at work for programming to control and download test equipment, crunch and graph the data for reports, and write the reports.
Also have FreeDOS and Borland Turbo C loaded on an ancient laptop.
And I still have my MSDOS 3.3 on 5 1/4” and 3.5” diskettes.
Raspberry Pi4 floating around here too. It’s more a Science Project / toy but it runs fine.
No windows machines here.
“I buy refurbs from Amazon, usually less that $150.”
I’ve bought many of those, too. They’ve been more dependable than me ones overall.
I think that when someone refurbishes a machine he’s more diligent about quality control than the q.c. of ones popping off a production line.