I needed to replace my aging desktop, which is my daily driver for
work, so last week I purchased a refurbished "business desktop" with
four CPU cores, a large SSD and plenty of RAM (32GB), which is more
computing power than I have ever had. My old desktop has half that
amount of RAM with a SATA HDD, and was beginning to groan under the
weight of all the web-based and other apps I'm forced to use while
at work. Things like Google apps and Slack were noticeably sluggish.

It of course came with Windows 10 pre-installed, so the first thing
I did was jump into the BIOS and disable secure boot, allow legacy
boot alongside UEFI, and enable virtualization support. Then I nuked
it all with a fresh Trisquel 11 install (currently in beta testing).

I'd like to try and keep the OS "pure", that is, running just free
software and drivers, and I think that's possible now if you're
careful (a free BIOS might also be possible depending on the
hardware, but I did not go that far). Instead of Virtualbox and the
guest additions, I'm opting for qemu/kvm and spice, with gnome-boxes
as the frontend. My Virtualbox Windows VM converted nicely to qcow2
format, and worked without a hitch once I installed the spice guest
agent. I can run the guest full-screen and run all the proprietary
crap I need to, without having to infect my host OS. I was impressed
that zoom worked perfectly inside the VM, including video.

I'm finding Trisquel 11 to be quite stable and usable, and on the
new hardware all the applications I need to run are much more
responsive. Although my desktop environment of choice is XFCE, I'm
staying with the stock Mate install for now. It is close to the
experience one had using Gnome 2 in say, 2010, with a bit more
polish and a cleaner look. My only reservation is systemd, which I'd
prefer not to rely on, but on a desktop it's not noticeably
different than sysv-init once the OS is booted.