Old ThinkPad in Mint condition

Putting this in the MSFT section to inspire MSFT to stop stomping on Windows to the point it drives away longtime Windows fans.

I gave my beloved T490 running Win 11 to my nephew as an early Christmas gift, since he needed a PC right now. My plan was to shop for a refurb T14 (I like ThinkPads) for myself. I needed a laptop till that happened, so I fired up a dusty old T430 running Mint, took some time to update and tweak it….and not sure I want to move on to another Win 11 PC now. My work laptop runs Win 11 Pro. I can use that for anything I can’t do on my old laptop running Mint. So far that has not happened.

I dual-booted Windows and Mint/Ubuntu for years, before deciding that was too much hassle. The past year-plus I have been glued to my T490, first on Win 10, then 11. The hassles started to get to me, but I still planned to replace it with another Win 11 PC. Then I dug into Mint Xfce again, for the first time in years….and man is this good stuff.

Mint runs better on a 12-year-old laptop (with RAM and SSD upgrades) that Win 11 did on a four or five-year-old laptop with twice the RAM, much newer and faster CPU, etc. No hassles, no ads, no nonsense. And I run most of the same programs I did on Windows. I don’t miss Office and there are the Office web apps if needed.

Not ready to bail on Windows and move to Linux-land for good. But that might happen someday. If any MSFT bigwigs read this: Please bring back the Windows I knew and mostly loved the first two decades of this century.