It depends on what you use your computer for, really. My partner isn’t very tech savvy and doesn’t use their computer for anything more than watching youtube and writing emails, so porting them directly to Ubuntu was super easy.

I haven’t done it in decades, so I don’t know if it’s changed, but there used to be an option called flying standby. You’d buy a ticket without a seat assigned, and you’d just go to the gate and wait to see if a flight went to your destination with an empty seat you could claim. It was cheaper, but no guarantee of getting a flight.