I'm in a similar situation running Linux on an old craptop with 4GB. Firefox runs horribly probably due to lack of RAM. Instead I use Opera on that machine which is much leaner. I won't use Chrome.
Sorry. I really dont have an answer for you. My dislike of apple products is quite irrational. I had an iphone many years ago and I couldn't get mp3's onto it so I think from then I disliked their products. A few weeks back I wanted to stream the grand tour from amazon to our tv using my wifes macbook but it just shat itself. Had to use my Windows laptop which worked 1st time.
Just to add: Friend of mine has an old 2006 Gateway laptop that simply would not run any version of Windows anymore reliably. Don't ask me why, but he is fond of that LT for whatever reason and wanted it saved. I Installed the newest version of Linuxlite and he's happy as clam... going so far as stating that it never ran as fast. Whatever, I'm glad it worked out. Myself, I have Mint running on my Dell Inspiron laptop for as long as Win10 has been out. No complications with anything including TWS. Reason it's running on the Dell is because originally it was running Win7 and the upgrade to 10 was an absolute nightmare. When I finally got 10 running, it kept cycling with 100% CPU usage. Every fix I got from MS or Tom's Hardware, or Youtube would work for a bit, then revert back to 100% CPU usage. That's when I said fuckit and made the switch. Couldn't be happier. Now my trading rig desktop turned out different. During the upgrade to Win10 I went through exactly the same problems as above, plus updater getting stuck in a loop. I spent 3 days on the fucker because no matter how much I like Linux, I still don't wanna be without a Windows OS. Whatever... After 3 days of fiddling with it, I got it to work ok. But here's the rub, after every subsequent update, it has gotten more efficient and stable. Right now, it's flawless with Win10. So there you go. Just wanna mention that the few Linux Distros that are user friendly, are. Mint especially. They have made it very easy to go from Windows to Linux. Not so much even 5 years ago.
I made the switch to Linux Ubuntu when windows 10 came out. Too many irritating things with Windows and when my new laptop was constantly updating I had had enough. That was two years ago and I think it was a great decision. For most things Linux worked fine and was actually easier than windows. From an OS perspective it did help that I was willing to mess around in a terminal on occasion. Google helped in those situations. Only real problem I had was with a full boot drive the first time I saw that error. For tools TWS is much faster on my Linux machine but tools like OptionVue have to be run through WINE or on another os which is a bit irritating. Lack of Windows is occasionally an issue when working with clients but Google docs help when libreoffice isn't enough. I do almost all my data analysis in Python so I'm not sure how good libreoffices spreadsheet is but it looked fine to me.
i find win 7 does everything i need and some. No need for windows 10 and their developers guessing what i am doing next...
I do sometimes feel like I never should have taken Win10... I had the exact same issues as @bronks when installing... ran into so many problems... but it's working fine on my desktop. I guess it just needs plenty of power.
So, have been using Linux Mint on my laptop. Works pretty good, I still have the occasional freeze in TWS though. So probably in the near future I'll be buying a new laptop. My kids can program the shit out of Linux if they want... (they're 4 and 2 though). Have already figured out the specs. i7-7700HQ with 16Gb ram and probably 128 SSD + a harddrive, maybe 1T... although I don't put a lot on there... maybe I should get a 256 SSD for the OS. Does the graphics card really matter that much if you're not gaming, but occasionally watch videos/netflix etc?
Yes and no it seems. What I gather, it comes down to what you want out of it. Inotherwords, if you want 4K resolution, looks like you gonna have to run Win10 with ms Edge browser with an I7 cpu and other stuff. Follow these links: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2846787/gpus-streaming-videos.html Now Linux prolly has a package for the exact same thing, but I haven't searched for it as I stream through the Chrome browser via Mint. The rez is 720p which is perfectly fine for a laptop. No issues at all.