Dell has always been a horrible company. Their main mechanism of profit in the early 2000’s was selling cheap, unusable laptops stuffed with spyware to poor people. In fact, Dell, Lenovo, and HP were so notorious that BestBuy literally created the GeekSquad to capitalize on the fact that Dell’s laptops were infected with spyware and needed to be “cleaned” before they could be useful.
Same. I've had two used Dell laptops over the years, running Linux, and no major problems other than the batteries going bad. The most recent I've had for 10+ years now and it's still going strong. Pretty sure it's an ex-corporate machine if that makes any difference.