User:FranzGratzer

Introduction

I am a graphic designer from Austria/Europe who has switched to Debian in 2008. The most common tools I do use for my work on the GNOME desktop are Nautilus, Evolution Mail, Scribus, Inkscape, GIMP, LibreOffice, gedit and FileZilla. In addition Plakativ and PDF Arranger do make my life easier when working with PDF files.

I don't work on desktop computers these days any more. I usually use my Lenovo ThinkPad T400s with Libreboot or sit on my Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E781. But I have installed GNU/Linux on hundreds of (mostly older) laptops for other people. Usually Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint do work well on basically all brands out of the box if those devices don't have a dedicated GPU and aren't very new any more. But I also had no issues so far with Fedora.

I specifically have had very good experiences with used high-end devices from the ThinkPad T-series and the Dell Latitude series which are cheaply available but do offer much more refined and reliable hardware than similarly cheap new devices. Of course the battery on new devices can be used much longer even if I replace the ones on older devices with brand new ones. But most common tasks can be done comfortably with older laptops. Especially if you use a SSD instead of a HDD and if you upgrade the RAM which unfortunately often isn't even possible on new devices nowadays any more.

Of course there are some edge cases where buying expensive new hardware would be beneficial. But not many people can justify to invest in this kind of performance because few people need to render 3D graphics, do high resolution video production or need to compile complex programs frequently.

In general, my experience has been that most people get tricked and tempted by advertisements and do replace their old hardware much more frequently as would make sense from a practical standpoint. We could avoid incredible amounts of e-waste if people did consider more carefully what they actually need. Of course it would also help if people knew which free operating system best fits their use case.