A couple of months ago I nearly replaced my personal laptop.

My daily driver is a 9-year-old Dell Latitude 7280. On paper the hardware is fine, but running Windows 10 it felt dead. The fans were constantly spinning, the system was sluggish, and the battery life had dropped to a useless 30 minutes.

Since the machine is too old for the official Windows 11 upgrade path, it was effectively living on borrowed time.

I’ve been using macOS for work for the last five years because Apple Silicon is hard to beat, but I like the idea of being a “tech polyglot” and not relying on a single ecosystem. I wanted to see if I could salvage the Dell.

Linux Mint is frequently recommended as the “just works” distro for older hardware, so I wiped the drive and installed it.

The Adblocker Effect

I’ve been running this setup for two months now, and so far it has been “boring”, which is a compliment. Nothing flashy, no ads in the menus, quick to use. Just what I want out of my machine, it feels like I own it too.

My favorite description of the experience of using Windows lately feels like browsing the web without an adblocker. It’s noisy, distracting, constantly trying to sell you things and just feels like everything is disjointed and slow.

Linux Mint so far for me is the complete opposite. It’s quiet, it doesn’t try to be clever, and it stays out of the way.

The hardware results were immediate:

• Silence: The fans used to wheeze constantly, but they almost never spin up now.
• Battery: I’m getting nearly two hours of usage, up from 30 minutes. The laptop is actually portable again.
• Drivers: This was my biggest worry, but everything (Wi-Fi, sound, display) worked out of the box.

The Workflow

I’m keeping my setup simple with mostly Firefox and VS Code.

I’ve been spending a lot of time building small tools with LLMs recently, like this family planner app I hacked together. For that workflow, a lightweight Linux environment is perfect. It feels closer to the metal than my Mac without the overhead of Windows.

My Mint setup

These are the highlights of the machine and install I’m writing this post on:

• Laptop: Dell Latitude 7280
• OS / DE: Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” (Ubuntu 24.04 base), Cinnamon 6.4.8 (X11)
• Kernel: 6.14.0-37-generic
• CPU / RAM: Intel i7-7600U (2C/4T), 16GB RAM
• Display: 1920×1080
• Storage: 512GB SanDisk X400 (ext4 root)
• Battery health: ~37.6% of original capacity remaining (about 22.5Wh now vs 60Wh design)

If you want to grab similar details on your own Linux box, this is the one-liner I used:

1

inxi -Fxz

Office apps (and the “real-life” test)

I installed two office suites (and LibreOffice comes pre‑installed with Mint):

• LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, Impress) — https://www.libreoffice.org/
• ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors — https://www.onlyoffice.com/

UI-wise, ONLYOFFICE feels closest to Microsoft Office, especially the ribbon layout and overall visual structure. LibreOffice is still the default workhorse and feels a little more “classic Linux,” but it’s rock-solid.

The best part: I got my wife to edit a document and print what she needed with zero hassle. That’s a big win on an older laptop.

I haven’t tried these yet, but they’re on my radar: WPS Office, SoftMaker Office, FreeOffice, Calligra Suite, and Apache OpenOffice.

I also haven’t had to do complex spreadsheets with macros or heavy Excel‑specific workflows. That might be a bigger issue for people who depend on those features.

Next steps: The Dual-Boot Experiment

Because this went so well, I’m planning to dual-boot the slightly newer Windows 11 laptop my son uses.

The stakes are higher there because his school relies on Microsoft Teams and Office, plus he spends a lot of time in Roblox.

I recently discovered Sober, a Flatpak wrapper for the Android version of Roblox. I’ve tested it on my Mint machine and it runs surprisingly well, which solves the biggest blocker for him.

There is a philosophy aspect to this too. Watching my son’s generation use computers, I’ve noticed they treat them purely as appliances or black boxes that run apps.

I know I praised Mint for “staying out of the way,” but for him I think a little friction might be healthy. If he has to drop into a terminal to fix a sound setting or tweak a config file, that’s a win. It teaches that the computer is something you can poke, prod, and change rather than a sealed unit you replace when it gets slow.