electromage

You can still use OneNote online or mobile.

Of course its in their best interest for you not to, that doesn't mean they can do a damn thing about it.

Are they using Azure AI?

Maybe they can make WoW expansions free with a subscription now, or make it all part of Xbox Game Pass?

That's an option for some, it's disabled by our enterprise policy. Anyway, that means setting up a third-party app on multiple systems - not a great solution unless you're in the mood for hosting a web client somewhere.

IMO Gmail is just terrible. Back in 2004 it was cool, but it's UX has stagnated for a long time, and almost anything is better. We switched from Outlook to Gmail at work and it's been awful for me. I loved the way Outlook handled meetings and reminders. It was also much easier to identify important mail. Everything looks like junk in Gmail, no matter how I tweak the layout and filters.

Personally I use ProtonMail, and I just started using Zoho too, both are faster, cleaner, and overall a much better experience.

In Seattle they are illegal to ride on sidewalks or streets signed >25MPH.

Noisy and stinky should be enough. But yeah they often seem to be driven by people who don't regard others.

Most tech people are just better than average at looking stuff up :)

I have never used Zorin, but it looks good - it's based on Ubuntu but tweaked to be more friendly to Windows/macOS users. If it's working for you, that's what counts. There's a lot of documentation around Ubuntu which should apply to your system.

"Barebones" usually just refers to a machine that is not complete, missing CPU, memory, storage, for customization. I assume you mean it's a basic/low-end configuration. Still, it seems to be a fairly recent generation of hardware. If you have a spinning disk, you'll see a huge performance increase by upgrading to an SSD. You can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35.

If you look at minimum/suggested requirements for almost any distro, I think you'll be comfortably above that. I looked up the laptop and it seems to have an AMD APU (similar to what's in a Steam Deck), optional NVMe drive, 8-16GB DDR4, WiFi 5... I'm running Ubuntu 23.04 on a 2015 laptop and it's fine, no difference at all from a current gen in Google Workspace.

That should be an easy fix though, you can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35. In fact OP said they were doing this because the original drive failed. You'd notice a huge difference going to flash.

That isn't an old laptop, it shouldn't have any bearing on which distro you pick. Ubuntu is solid, I've been mostly happy with KDE Neon. Web experience is going to the same across the board. Will you be gaming?