I worked for a shady evil company, and when they illegally fired me, I never ended up returning a laptop - thinkpad running windoze.
Let’s say I wanted to put Win 8 or similar on it so I can play some video games. What would potentially be barriers to doing this? Said evil company is hopefully going out of business soon, and is a clusterfuck anyway, so they might not end up asking for it back.
I would wipe the disk so theres no shady things, depending on what games u play, i would install linux and use encryption if you would take this laptop to public places. Performance on linux will be much smoother. I recommend endeavouros.
EDIT: also reinstall bios/uefi firmware would be nice, probably not but there might be some spying?
Depending on what games you play, I warmly recommend “a BSD”, like FreeBSD, which supports both Linux (in the kernel) and Windows (via Wine) emulation.
I guess linux has more docummentation, but thats also nice option, is performace on bsd better than linux?
“More documentation” is a double-edged sword. Under the BSDs, the documentation is shorter, but better; and much of it is also much less complicated, so you don’t even have to look at it all the time.
It depends.