No antivirus needed. No activation keys. No “Your PC will restart for updates” every day.
Using another borrowed laptop, Carlos wrote the Debian ISO to a USB with dd . He booted Elena’s PC from the USB, ran the installer in Spanish, and chose “Guided – use entire disk” (after saving her data to an external drive). Within 25 minutes, the old machine rebooted into a clean, fast GNOME desktop.
Elena learned the basics: Firefox for research, LibreOffice for documents, and a simple menu for library records. The system used less than 1 GB of RAM—her old 2 GB machine flew.