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.
Take out the sim card if it has one some TP do. Properly wipe the hdd or smash and trash get a new one. Windows 8 era ironically has an easier time on Linux, at least for me DirectX 10.1 stuff is well covered even surpassed with something’s like luxtorpedia.
ThinkPad isn’t a MacBook there will be little to no supply tracking.If there IT company has you registered as letting the laptop a liquidator might be in touch but usually they only sell lots based on on-prem assets.