Manbart

Crash reports are one thing, but web browsing data and enumerating devices on your local network go well beyond that objective

From https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/topics/idsa-cip.html

Other devices in your computing environment

The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast

information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.

The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.

I recently got a Chromebook from work (it's no longer supported by manufacturer, so it was bound for ewaste). A Toshiba Chromebook 2 (model CB35-B3440).

Installing Linux was pretty uneventful after struggling a bit to get ChromeOS re-installed, which I had to do as the original image was 'enterprise managed' and thus had developer mode disabled. After reinstalling ChtomeOS and removing the hardware write lock (a foil sticker on the MoBo), I ran the install script from https://mrchromebox.tech/ which reflashed the firmware to Coreboot. Its pretty much a standard EFI laptop at that point.

It has 4GB memory, an Intel Celeron N2840 CPU and 16GB eMMC. I put Fedora LXQT on it. Overall, it is very underpowered in the CPU department, noticeably more so even compared to other low end laptops of similar vintage I have. But, its good enough for web browsing and e-book reading. The HD screen looks pretty good and the best part is the batterey life is way better than any other laptop I've had. You can actually use it for a full day on a single charge. If you understand the limitations, its a worthwhile device considering the cost of these ranges from free in m case to about $40 used on Ebay

I run Office 365 as a PWA at work, it works good enough. And I pretty much use it just for Outlook anyway (I never can get the shared calendars to work in the native Linux email clients), LibreOffice is good enough for my word docs, diagrams and spreadsheets. It helps that we use SharePoint, which doesn't support all of the formatting features of desktop Office anyway

Wow, I had no idea they are still around

Like everything, it's a trade off. Windows allows different versions of the same libraries, but at the cost of an ever growing WinSXS folder and slow updates