Yesterday’s amusement - replacing the operating system on the wife’s old netbook that had a now no longer supported Windows XP.
First I used UNetbootin to install a copy of Android X86 via a thumb drive. That 20 minute exercise, followed by some playing around with Android convinced me that she would not have a good user experience with that configuration. Too many assumptions on the part of apps that they were on a touch screen / orientation aware smart phone.
So I decided a Linux installation was more likely to be a better replacement. I went with Ubuntu 14.04. After a couple of mis-steps because the UNetbootin downloaded version of the installer was apparently corrupt I downloaded the current 32 bit ISO, re-installed that on the thumb drive, and installed that on the netbook’s hard drive.
That went well - up to the point where I tried to use LibreOffice to open a set of image heavy PowerPoint slides. I’d forgotten what a memory hog LibreOffice is. But other than that she is left with a netbook more functional than the original.