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.
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 machine here.
Same here, except I buy from New Egg. I read lots of their reviews and look for trends, never yet been steered wrong.
Old components go through three phases. New & expensive, old & cheap, and then really old, rare and expensive. I look for post-institutional lease boxes, which usually have a mediocre CPU and too little RAM. I look for ones old enough that I can buy the top-tier CPU for that socket type dirt cheap, and that will take at least 32GB RAM. Upgrading the slug & RAM usually costs another $150. Then another $100 for an M.2 SSD to host the OS and the swap space. My /Home slice goes on a YUGE SATA drive. Makes Linux SCREAM for $400.