Over the past decade or so, I’ve managed to accumulate four laptops:
Garnet
- Model: HP 17-ca0003na
- OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed
- Desktop: KDE Plasma (Wayland)
- Year: 2019
Amethyst
- Model: ThinkPad T400
- OS: Arch Linux
- Desktop: Sway (Wayland)
- Year: 2007
Pearl
- Model: MacBook A1181
- OS: Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”
- Desktop: Aqua (Quartz)
- Year: 2007
- OS: crunchbang++ 12
- Desktop: Openbox (X11)
LapisLazuli
- Model: Acer Aspire 5742z
- OS: Fedora 38
- Desktop: MATE (X11)
- Year: 2009
Strangely, on Pearl, the brand new Linux with brand new software actually runs faster and cooler than OSX.
There was also a period of about two years where Amethyst was more powerful than Garnet, although I would blame this on Garnet trying to run Windows 10 with only 4GB of RAM while Amethyst had 8GB and ran Linux Mint.
I tolerate slowness, but I also usually manage to reduce it to the point where it’s not a problem anymore.