mmmh… I’m from a poor south american country and my hard disk broke like three years ago and I’ve been running Debian in a SD card since then. I remember trying Manjaro but it didn’t let me install the system on the SD. Thanks to Linux I’m currently able to work from home. I would had to ask my boss a computer if not and it would be a Windows machine
Source : https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/nqzj0c/7_sd_cardsized_soc_running_debian_10/
This kind of difficulties use to happen when you try to deal with an ethical replacement with low resources.
During the gross part of the pandemic, I was studying WebDev and my graphical card of the tower got broken.
I had to deal with a low-spec laptop in the resource hungry nonfree Goolag Meet daily meeting, having NetBeans open and test things in Apache Tomcat at the same time. Dealing with hard moments mostly because of the meeting resources use even with a more low-resource usage replacement for Tomcat (Payara which takes less resources at boot time of the WebApp).
Just because the computer from the school would have had the same limitations as with this guy and I wouldnt have been able to replace the OS by the limited time and restrictions imposed.
You dont need exactly be from poor country.