When my Thinkpad x250 broke down last week with what appears to be a motherboard failure, I tried to convince my daughter to hand over her T410 but work-from-home-schooling does not work without a computer, so she refused. Disillusioned in my diminishing parenting powers, I dug up my 10 year old Samsung n135 netbook instead. It still had Ubuntu 14.10 running and the battery was pining for the fjords, but after buying a new battery (€29), updating Ubuntu to 18.04 LTS and switching to Lubuntu it really is usable again.

Now to be honest, I did get replacement laptop (a bulky T510 with only 4GB of RAM) with my own SSD inside from my supplier, so I’m not using that old netbook full-time, but happy to have it running smoothly nonetheless.

The future, to end this old-fashioned geekery off with, will very likely be a Dell XPS-13 9300 (yep, I’ll be cheating on Lenovo) on which I’ll happily install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on. I’ve upgraded my wife’s x240 to that already and I must say it runs smoothly and looks great when compared to 18.04 which I’m still running.