Saved an old desktop and laptop from the trash by installing mint and Firefox with ublock. The desktop lasted them for years without any problems, and I think the only problem I supported on the laptop over years was the boot mount filled itself up during updates and needed to be cleaned up.

Comp sci undergrad from a mid tier university graduated in 2012, didn’t need Windows at all. I mostly used an Ubuntu desktop, pocket sized mini laptop with bsd, and a red hat vdi the school provided during a research assistantship.

The school had labs in the library and comp sci building if you needed windows for something but it never came up. Group projects shared files on school provided web based tools or dropbox and used the same for class forums, sharing docs and assignments, etc. Some web stuff was broken for Firefox and had to use chrome, but never hit anything requiring IE (pre Edge).

Even if you’re not in a technical field you may want to explore some of the common tools they use like git for version control (like save/restore points in a video game), LaTeX/TeX for better typesetting than office, and off-site backups.

Can you flip it upside down so it looks like they are riding a robot spider?

TeX. I was able to use it during school for some beautiful type setting and formatting but nobody I work with wants to use anything other than plain text or unfortunately more commonly binary wysiwyg editor formats. It’s frustrating and ugly.