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I have been given a budget of £250 to buy a laptop. I keep hearing and reading that Linux will help me escape the microsoft/google matrix. But I may still need Word and Excel. You guys are smart so tell me: do I have a chance or am I being retarded? Would I need a techy guy to help set it up to reconfigure stuff or purchase software or is there an off-the-shelf option? Could I buy new or should I try eBay etc. Thanks fellas.

Edit - thanks for the replies

I have been given a budget of £250 to buy a laptop. I keep hearing and reading that Linux will help me escape the microsoft/google matrix. But I may still need Word and Excel. You guys are smart so tell me: do I have a chance or am I being retarded? Would I need a techy guy to help set it up to reconfigure stuff or purchase software or is there an off-the-shelf option? Could I buy new or should I try eBay etc. Thanks fellas. Edit - thanks for the replies

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[–] • 2 pts

For a £250 budget, yeah, you are better off going on ebay and looking at either the used or refurbished laptops. Pretty much anything over five years old will have good support from the linux kernel out of the box, though you may need to install separate "driver" packages for the wifi chipset, but this varies by laptop manufacturer and things have gotten much better these days.

If you are going to purchase a laptop which is five or 10 years old, especially one with a lower spec'ed CPU or RAM, I would recommend running a distro that gives you either the LXDE or XFCE desktop environments. is a good example.

I would recommend PopOS, but it runs Gnome3 for the desktop environment, and if your CPU is on the slower side, it may struggle to keep up.

Office alternatives are in plenty. You can use the online O365 apps, of course, but there are propietery office suites like and which try to match the theme and functionality of Office 2013 and above as best they can. WPS is supposed to have the best office doc format compatibility, though I have never tried it myself.