My previous two laptops came with Windows installed, it was XP and Win7, which I happily used for a year or two, until despite my best efforts, the whole system

My previous two laptops came with Windows installed, it was XP and Win7, which I happily used for a year or two, until despite my best efforts, the whole system got crudded and slow, and at some point a teensy crashy or maybe I got a virus and that's when I put Linux on the thing. That easily gave the device a few more years of useful life. (my current laptop also came with windows, but I just backed up the factory image, wiped and installed Linux right away). Anyway, while every version[0] of Windows I have used has become inescapably crudded up and slower over time, on Linux, even the old laptop, the only thing that got slower over time was the web browser. Which has mostly to do with webpages becoming heavier. [0] Actually win95 cause I can't remember if this also happened on win 3.11 and the like.