I decided to go ubuntu 14.whatever on a laptop that had XP on it (Acer One) and keep it as-is, as a new user.

I was pleasantly surprised. install was smooth, all hardware works, and I just installed firefox, and it all works (99% of flash works).

I use it for gmail, facebook, twitter, ello, surfing, etc. The machine is underpowered for full-motion video, but oh well, it was $349 6 years ago.

I use terminal to ssh into remote servers, and I've done no configuration at all on the machine. it works fine.