I’ve developed a hobby of restoring old laptops, repairing them, and putting Linux on them. Taking old discarded hardware and making it useful again gives me some degree of satisfaction. The machine I’m using now is an old ThinkPad T470 that I assembled from 3 non-functioning machines. In my previous Linux posts, I talked about my Alienware and running the high-performance CachyOS on it. Well, since then, that machine suffered a catastrophic mainboard failure due to a voltage issue. “Fried” is the technical term for it. So I scavenged the NVME drives and the RAM and installed what I could into this Lenovo. I’ve been very pleased with it. I’ve been driving it daily ever since. I just can’t game on it. Business Class laptops are potatoes in the Graphics department. But it does everything else just grand.

In my new hobby – I’ve been working on machines up to five at a time. I have a small arsenal of USB Thumb Drives loaded with a different Linux Distro on each, and I’ve been testing a number of different Distros at the same time. I’ve now tested over thirty different Linux Distros… and I have opinions. The three easiest Distros are Ubuntu, Zorin, and Mint. The latest Ubuntu, 26.04.1, is hands down the most complete and polished of all of them, offering a very easy switch to Windows Refugees. You don’t have to know how to use Linux. You don’t have to know how to use Terminal Commands. You can just use it, and it just works. Everything is where you would expect it be. It was easier to switch to Ubuntu and Mint and Zorin, than it was to switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11.