I have two laptops that - even being 8 years and 4 years old fit the specs MS decided to set.

I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job. And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.

What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 - 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux. It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever corp crapware is installed underneath).

Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs) I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides a WIN machine...

My daily driver is a second hand W540 that was made in 2014 or so. It's got the maximum RAM that it will take (32G), and a larger HD, other than that it's just the same old box. It's indestructible and rock solid, drives three monitors and I couldn't be happier with it.