gila [any, any]

In my experience it’s just the shell and I/O, fingerprint reader etc that vary, if you need usb-c or HDMI out or whatever then look for the model numbers that have them, otherwise just buy based on specs you need, they’re 95% the same

I just put Fedora on my mum’s Chromebook and told her it was an update

It made it easier for her to access email anyway

broadly, gain flexibility, lose familiarity. just try it and see.

one thing i’ll spell out, you’ve likely never had to consider the logic by which windows loads dll versions. essentially, if you put a modified dll file in the same folder as an executable, when the executable calls for it that modified dll will be loaded instead of the system’s builtin version. game and software cracks sometimes rely on this principle. but on linux via wine/proton, that isn’t the case. so you’ll need to configure wine/proton to do a “dll override” in some cases (i.e when your game/software crack utilizes a modified dll). the process is pretty straight-forward, the main thing is knowing you need to do it.