This weekend, I gave my girlfriend’s dad a nice computer with Linux mint installed. I put a shortcut to windows 11 setup to run in virtualbox, in case there were things that he felt he needed windows for (to spare him the frustration of needing to tinker too much if he didn’t want to).

Down with Microsoft spyware.

That seems 100% fine to me. If you’re looking for an excuse, by all means upgrade but those numbers seem acceptable.

Unrelated to their question but I think Linux users would be more likely than windows users to opt out, when presented with such a prompt.

Windows 11 is enshitified enough to be annoying and loaded with government and corporate spyware enough to be alarming. Meanwhile, Linux has become user friendly, optimized for everything but the latest hardware and capable of running most games.

I don’t know how the timing of each release is planned but the Firefox website gives instructions for using the repositories for esr, beta, nightly, or dev edition.

Using Debian as your distro doesn’t lock you into firefox ESR.

I don’t know anything about Mac hardware, but if it’s possible to put another 2gb of RAM in there and an SSD, it should be fine for web browsing.

I did something similar for a friend. I spent about $25 on hardware to put equivalent upgrades in an old laptop that had a single core celeron processor. I installed linux mint xfce. It ran firefox fine but couldn’t quite play smooth video on YouTube. It was otherwise usable. A dual core should be workable.