OK, now I get it. Yes, my experiences with Linux have been ridiculously good for a long time, but that is indeed also due to being careful with what I buy.

Nowadays it’s generally gotten pretty easy compared to a few years back, but there are still rough edges there.

I also expect this is more of an issue with cheaper solutions? Because nothing I touched in the last 10+ gave me any real problem. With maybe the exception of getting NVidia Optimus to work?

For a company it wouldn’t be so unreasonable to say “we’ll transition to Linux over this period of time” and replace incompatible hardware as you progress. The hardware replacement will be a small fraction of your switching costs.

The company I work at has decided to be Linux centric a long time ago, and basically all laptops are years old refurbished Thinkpads that run just fine with no intervention and no hacking.

But the university where I worked at before had a framework deal with Dell, and while I was one of the few people using Linux, I never had trouble with hardware compatibility on those Optiplex and Latitude. To the point that when I was getting a new machine, I would clone the old partition and just boot into a perfectly working system.

I use Arch, BTW.

investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative

Do you care to elaborate? If I had to write a list of reasons why Linux might not be ready for your average cubicle… Stability wouldn’t be one of them.

And those are the night for beans n tuna.

Yeah, I work in a making very high end scientific equipment. Almost almost the whole operation runs on Linux. All laptops are refurbished Thinkpads, and most desktops are pretty old and slow from a maimstream POV, but they are just fine for the task, and then some. My “new” laptop I got last summer is a 2018 laptop which cost 300€ refurbished.

If I can do decent science on that, I’m not sure what everyone else needs a 2000€ machine for.

I’m sure someone does, but I expect really they’re few and far between.

I understand that Brave is a very good browser, from a technical standpoint, but it just feels annoying. For one, the constant crypto advertisement is a real turn off.

Firefox is also the only real mobile browser that lets me have extensions, so I can use stuff like uBlock or BypassPaywall.