Re: Good to know.
> I agree that it is sad when these giants lose concern for older customers & don't spend a minuscule amount of their billions to support older hardware that still works & serves a purpose. Our landfills are over filled & our world is becoming irreversibly polluted.
Strongly agreed. Which is another reason for keeping 13-14 year old laptops in use, of course, in addition to the much better keyboards, bigger range of ports, etc.
I would not personally buy nVidia kit, no. But the quad-core version of the Thinkpad W520 has one and it's not negotiable. The Core i7 version of the T420 has one.
If I have the thing in there, then I want to use it.
After the downgrade, I only needed to change one thing to have all the same apps: add a repo for VirtualBox, so I could get rid of 6 and install 7. All my other apps are fully up to date.
I also removed a whole list of custom APT repositories for Skype, Signal, Telegram, Spotify, and other fairly rarely-used apps -- many installed with `deb-get` -- and replaced them with the Snap packaged versions with the built-in tools. Snap is pretty quick these days and it was considerably less work than ensuring all those repos have old enough versions for a 3YO Ubuntu and that they work, Ubuntu has current signing keys, etc.
I know, this is heresy, it will horrify many who consider themselves purists, but it works. I may in time do the same with everything that doesn't _require_ a native `.deb` package. Snap is built in and I find it cleaner and simpler than Flatpak.