Couple years ago I bought a Thinkpad, back when everything came with Win10 but you could still do the Win7 downgrade. I tried to do just that, but everything went sideways in roughly the same ways as your post, just with different details.
After two weeks and getting Lenovo to physically FedEx me some Win7 recovery media and I STILL couldn't get the license key to take, I threw up my hands and decided to see if 2017 might truly be the year of the Linux desktop.
I threw Ubuntu on it and everything was just flawless. From the first boot. Set up full-disk encryption with no hassles at all, pointed a backup target at my NAS, found a few Gnome tweaks to correct little UI misfeatures like the alt-tab delay, and went on about my day.
As a lifelong DOS/Windows user up to that point, but now a 6-year Linux convert, I wonder why I waited so long. At some point Ubuntu hosed itself in a dist-upgrade so I switched to Pop!OS, which took less than an hour and I restored my last backup and everything just works again. It's bizarre that anything could be so trouble-free. Case-sensitive filesystems still annoy me but I'm slowly memorizing all the weird capitalized directories and stuff, a small price to pay.
After two weeks and getting Lenovo to physically FedEx me some Win7 recovery media and I STILL couldn't get the license key to take, I threw up my hands and decided to see if 2017 might truly be the year of the Linux desktop.
I threw Ubuntu on it and everything was just flawless. From the first boot. Set up full-disk encryption with no hassles at all, pointed a backup target at my NAS, found a few Gnome tweaks to correct little UI misfeatures like the alt-tab delay, and went on about my day.
As a lifelong DOS/Windows user up to that point, but now a 6-year Linux convert, I wonder why I waited so long. At some point Ubuntu hosed itself in a dist-upgrade so I switched to Pop!OS, which took less than an hour and I restored my last backup and everything just works again. It's bizarre that anything could be so trouble-free. Case-sensitive filesystems still annoy me but I'm slowly memorizing all the weird capitalized directories and stuff, a small price to pay.