I'm kind of amazed at the Chromebook I got for $250. I can do pretty much everything I need with it, it has good battery life. I can even do some coding with it. I bought it as a stopgap when the Dell I ran Ubuntu on died, but since I don't do a lot of coding these days outside of work, haven't replaced the Dell yet.
Same experience, except all 4 of my Mac and Linux laptops still work fine.
I bought a Lenovo Chromebook two years ago for $300: includes keyboard case and pen. Linux containers work well (but a little slowly). If I were poor, I could have a good digital life with just this one device.
My 300 euro Asus 1215B netbook bought with Linux in 2009 is still going, without sharing everything I do with Google, and survived several Ubuntu upgrades.
I've had a number of these Dells over the years, and most have been great. This one developed a problem with the wifi system that I think must be in the HW.
You can often easily replace the internal WiFi card - Intel cards were usually the best bet in my experience (especially on Linux - sometimes best to replace when you buy laptop if Linux is your main OS). I have done quite a few replacements for friends.
if just the Bluetooth craps out and you have a spare USB-A port then you can get cheap Bluetooth dongles.
Is WiFi failure something that happens? I've never seen one. I did upgrade a few cards (in one to go from B to G, in other from N to AC), and I replaced a few broadcom cards with intel ones to get better Linux support, but I don't think I ever saw a broken card.
I think the theory is that cards go out of spec and start connecting less reliably. I replaced a friend’s WiFi card the other day when they were about to throw the laptop out because connectivity was poor (Windows, and it wasn’t a driver issue). Obviously you also need a reliable access-point (that’s a much more difficult topic to address!). And don’t forget some secondary means to connect to laptop to the internet or you can’t download the driver!
