Long story short, I’m less than enchanted with MSFT these days, as a company, its operating systems, or it’s other products. There is a reason it is called by many “the Borg.”
In any case, I had an old laptop; very old – bought as a WOOT deal by a neighbor years ago, and given to me for free because the kids didn’t want it). It’s only got 2 GB of memory, and a 32GB HD, and the latest “update” to Win10 broke it, and with nothing on it but the OS it didn’t have enough room to update. So I bit the bullet, pulled out an old Linux Mint USB drive I picked up a while back, and tried it out. It worked faster running Mint off the USB drive than Windows did on the HDD. So I paved the windows disk and installed just Linux Mint, no residual Windoze10 at all. It found my network drivers, could surf the net, and do everything you need a small, cheap, expendable laptop to do. And it had ~20GB of disk space to spare for programs, data, whatever. Totally cool. Ran a few largely automated updates, and it all worked flawlessly. interface was windows-like and easy. Libre Office installed fine, so I can write or do normal modest “productivity” things.
If you have an older machine, and don’t like the MegaCorp Monopolies, support the alternatives, so that they can work on better, more moral AI warships :-).
Update – it works fine with an Ethernet cable plugged in, but doesn’t want to see the WiFi . Claims the drivers are installed, doesn’t see any WiFi anywhere, even though it used it two days ago after the initial install just fine.