Windows to Linux? Are you ready to take the leap?

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LINUX By Sandra Henry-Stocker Are tighter security, more customizable interfaces, and the availability of source code enough to make you switch? What
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Steve, Ascaris, SueW, wdburt1, Charlie, Sueska, abbodi86, klang

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Heh, I was ready five years ago. I’m new at this compared to some, but Linux is ~ now!

Previously, all of my Linux PCs started as Windows PCs. I built my desktop and bought my Asus F8 series laptop (in 2008) to be Windows machines, but in 2015 they were converted to dual-boots. My Dell Inspiron (purchased at the very end of 2017) was too small to hold Windows even as a single boot, so I made it Linux only. My Acer Swift 1 (early 2018) and Dell G3 gaming laptop (late 2018) were bought with Windows 10 preinstalled, then converted to dual-boot. On the two laptops I bought in 2018, I shrunk the partitions as much as I could for the Windows volumes. It could boot and run Windows, but it would not have been able to do a feature update.

I just ordered my first non-Windows PC less than a month ago (Dell XPS 13 “Developer’s Edition,” from their business sales department, though I am not a developer or a business user), and that laptop is the replacement for my Swift as a “go everywhere” unit.

In addition, just yesterday I finally removed Windows 10 from my Dell G3. I’ve often said I still have Windows on my Swift and G3 because I haven’t yet needed the space it takes up enough to make it worth removing it… but that time has come. I wanted the SSD space Windows was using, so I got rid of it along with the other three (!) versions of Linux I had on the G3: Mint 20, Fedora 33, Kubuntu 20.04. Like the XPS, it’s single-boot Neon now.

I previously had my G3’s 250GB NVMe SSD (Samsung 970 Evo) divided among the five OSes, with /home and /mnt/data on the 1TB SATA SSD (Samsung 850 Evo). I have a separate volume for data to maintain commonality with my PCs that use LUKS encrypted data volumes… I use the self-encryption on the 850 Evo instead. I use Syncthing to keep all of the units synced, so I want the same partitioning schema on all of them. The home directories are not synced, as they are unique to each installation, but they’re almost identical by design.

Now I have / and /home on the 970 Evo, and the entire 850 Evo is the self-encrypted data volume. The stuff that remains in home is just the various config files and non-sensitive stuff… the browser and email profiles, my pictures and videos, documents, etc., are all on the encrypted volume.

With /home off of the 850, there’s more room for data, but I had to ditch the pentaboot. No matter; it’s been a long time since I used any of the others. I still have my Veeam images of the old schema in case I want to bring it back.

So now I am at a point where two of my three daily-use PCs are straight Linux, not dual boots.

Not really what you asked, but in the ballpark at least. FWIW, The G3 is used as its “gaming” moniker would suggest, with a combination of Linux native titles and Windows games that are run through Proton or WINE. The number of Windows games that run flawlessly in Linux might surprise some people.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Steve

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I like Linux and really wish I could use it every day but just constantly keep banging into the same obstacles.  I am a IT consultant and a business user.  Not being able to break free of Microsoft Office because there is no truly plug and play compatible product is a big deal breaker.  And just about every larger company I service has line of business software, both custom and off the shelf, that requires Windows and does not offer a Linux alternative.

That said, I have Linux running on all sorts of hardware in just about every work environment handling the kinds of tasks at which it excels.  Things like servers and thin clients are an easy choice for Linux, as are desktop or laptop needs that don’t specifically need MS Office.

 

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In “and what if you switched” you left out that there are a lot of programs that aren’t available for Linux, like Autodesk Fusion 360  and quicken.  That’s a deal breaker for many of us.

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. . . . Are you ready to take the leap?

I don’t think the majority of Windows users will ever be ready to take the leap.
If Linux, or any other free operating systems for that matter, are professed by some to be so much better than Windows, can’t actually *sell itself/themselves as being better, then there’s something that is wrong somewhere.
Notice I said *sell – in reality, they can’t give it away – it’s free but still can’t give it away and that must be a first basis for doubt to those who have actually paid for versions of an OS.

I’ve known and still know folks who will argue/fight to the end if necessary, that Linux is far better than Windows and insult everyone who is stupid enough to use anything MS.
I do know that every one of those Linux users has a Windows machine hidden in plain sight to use when they need to! That need apparently is more often than they let on!

Discussions like this can often turn into nasty arguments and my input to this thread will be restricted to what I’ve wrote here, but FWIW, things might be different if schools used free, open-source OSs and kids were taught a different, cheaper, method of computing.
Thing is though, Microsoft have thought of that one and give schools/academy’s/colleges/universities very, very special deals on their hardware/software and often give it away.
Why would the learning places wholly go for a Linux/Open-Source free system, when they can go for the Microsoft free?

Personally, I don’t use Linux on a daily basis, but have shown many friends, colleagues, whoever is interested, the workings of Linux in a Virtual Machine with a view of showing a viable alternative and they don’t want to know.
Why – perhaps because of the years of working with Microsoft’s hardware/software that works for them and that experience/environment is not so easy to shake off – even when an option is free.

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wavy

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Moonshine wrote:

If Linux, or any other free operating systems for that matter, are professed by some to be so much better than Windows, can’t actually *sell itself/themselves as being better, then there’s something that is wrong somewhere.

That’s just it. No one is trying to *sell* Linux. It’s not a company, and it doesn’t have a marketing department. There are no Linux salesmen calling PC vendors and trying to sell them on the idea of putting their OS on new PCs that are sold, and the vast majority of people don’t ever use an OS other than the one that came on the hardware (nor would they necessarily realize there is a distinction between the hardware and the software as such).

Microsoft didn’t get to the position they are now in by being the best. They got there by being the most aggressive, and possibly the most sneaky and devious. They had a deal to jointly develop OS/2 with IBM, and while they were supposed to be doing that, they were also developing Windows 3.0, a competing product. IBM was no angel, but they were incredibly stodgy and set in their ways, and the smaller, nimbler, craftier Microsoft ate their lunch. It wasn’t that Windows 3.0 was better than OS/2 (which would have ended up being much better if MS and IBM had continued to develop it as partners)… it was that Gates was better at reading the handwriting on the wall than anyone at IBM.

That, and the earlier moment when Gates settled for a one-time payment for PC-DOS rather than a per-unit royalty, as long as MS would be able to market it as MS-DOS, are why Microsoft became the dominant OS vendor.

That, of course, does not mean that Windows was always the substandard product many Linux fans claim it to be. Particularly since it moved to the NT base, it’s actually been quite decent most of the time, and when it wasn’t (as with Vista), it improved as the issues were fixed, although in that case few people even realized Vista was ever any good, as they’d already given up on it.

Had MS released another 7 or XP, I’d probably be writing this from Windows… but they didn’t, and I’m not.

Moonshine wrote:

I’ve known and still know folks who will argue/fight to the end if necessary, that Linux is far better than Windows and insult everyone who is stupid enough to use anything MS.

I’ve talked to these kind of people too, and I don’t think their zealotry is liable to win many converts. You can’t cram something down someone’s throat.

I won’t insult anyone if they use Windows, or Mac, or anything else. A PC is a highly personal thing for a lot of people, but ultimately it is a tool, and if you want to use one particular tool, I am not going to tell you that you should be using a different one. I will help to ease the transition if someone does wish to break free of Microsoft, and I certainly will explain what I don’t like about Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or any of the rest of them, but there’s no reason to insult users over their choice of OS, browser, or whatever else.

I do know that every one of those Linux users has a Windows machine hidden in plain sight to use when they need to! That need apparently is more often than they let on!

If true, that doesn’t constitute an admission that Windows is better. It just means Windows has more market share, which we already knew.

I haven’t yet removed Windows from all my machines. It’s off two of my three daily-use PCs, and the only reason it is still on the third (my desktop) is that it has three SSDs and a big hard drive, and the amount of space Windows takes up hasn’t been needed for something more important yet. That one has Windows 8.1, which I probably haven’t booted in at least 6 months. I’d deep-six it in an instant (as I did with the G3 laptop) if I ever needed the disk space.

I still have a Windows in a virtual machine, though. I seldom need to use it, but it’s a tool in the toolbox if I do. It’s not that Windows can do anything Linux cannot, but (for just one example) if I want to program the profiles on my Corsair mouse or keyboard, there simply is no Linux version of the software to perform that task. There’s no technical reason for this, as it’s just that Corsair hasn’t bothered to release software for Linux.

If some other vendor offers a competing product that does have a native Linux program, I will certainly have to consider that very carefully for my next purchase. Until then, Windows can live in a virtual machine, and by having the ability to restore snapshots in a couple of seconds, that control that Microsoft decided to take from the user and give to themselves is mine once again.

When I had the dual-boot setup on the G3 and the Swift, I would occasionally boot Windows to check out one thing or another. It would be things like testing the battery life of the Swift while playing a video continuously vs. the same in Linux, and other stuff like that. When I was finished, I would sometimes be annoyed to find that the only options Windows was willing to give me were “update and shut down” and “update and reboot.” Where’s “don’t update, just reboot?” That’s the option I require. I am not interested in having my PC sit there and install updates while I twiddle my thumbs and wait for hardware I own to become usable again… and even less so in order to update an OS that I don’t particularly care about. If I did, I would have initiated the update manually (making me a “seeker”).

There have been anecdotes of people pulling a laptop out of the bag to begin a Powerpoint presentation, only for the person to discover that it was Microsoft time, and that the only reasonable way (for a non-techie business user) to get to that presentation on the laptop was to let it do its update and hope to the deity of their choice that it didn’t take an hour, while all of the very busy people in business suits glance at their watches and frown.

If the Windows in question was in a VM, it would take about five seconds to restore a snapshot and get Windows serving the owner of the machine instead of Microsoft once again. Windows 10 is a lot tamer when it doesn’t actually get to decide the things it thinks it does.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Steve, jagshemash, Cybertooth

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Linux is a real alternative to Windows, of that I am sure.  There are some aspects of it which may prevent it from achieving dominance.  There is still a bit of a “science project” feel to the OS, which is closely tied to the command line (shell script) mentality.  Not for the casual user.  And don’t get me started with the hoops one must jump through to install 3rd party drivers.  The user is at the mercy of the “Linux community” to provide updates, if they don’t lose interest and go on to support the latest trend.  Literally dozens of “flavors” of Linux to choose from, thus compounding the support environment. All in all, a bargain considering it’s free.

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I appreciate the effort in not sounding too negative, but I still don’t see it as troublesome as you suggest.

anonymous wrote:

There is still a bit of a “science project” feel to the OS, which is closely tied to the command line (shell script) mentality

Linux is not an OS, per se. The term “Linux” itself properly refers to the kernel, though in practice it is often used to refer to any of the various OSes that are built on the Linux kernel. Each distro is really its own OS, though they’re all pretty closely related. A lot of what you learn about one distro applies just as much to any other, with only minor differences (like how one distro may put a file in “/usr/lib” and another may put it in “/usr/lib64”).

Which distro and desktop environment do you mean feels like a science project? Each desktop has its own feel, its own way of doing things, and its own level of polish. The variety of desktop environments (and the differences between those and distros, which may not be immediately apparent) can be somewhat overwhelming to newbies, but once they get their feet wet, it’s fantastic to be able to have the GUI look and feel as you want rather than what someone else has chosen. To those people who don’t know where to begin, I would say just try a distro that is often suggested as being good for new users, and don’t worry too much about which one it is. The one you try may or may not end up being “the right one” for you, but by the time you realize it’s not quite right, you’ve already learned enough to start having an idea of where to go next.

I use Linux on a daily basis, and I don’t use the command line all that much. When I do, it’s often a copy and paste thing. Some things I remember, but for other things, I have a vague idea of what the command syntax is, but I don’t remember exactly. I enter what I am looking for into DDG, and when I find what I need, I see that it’s the thing I was thinking of, and then I copy-paste it.

I would not recommend blindly entering any command you see on a web site (be sure the source is trusted unless you can look at the command and see what it does), but once I see it, it’s evident what it does. I don’t remember as much of it as I once used to in MS-DOS, certainly. Some things, yes, but not to the degree that I used to in the DOS days. I guess I don’t use it enough to really remember it, but that’s kind of the point, right?

anonymous wrote:

Not for the casual user.

Several casual users of Linux who frequent this site may disagree. On the other hand, a family member (and former Windows user, from the Win 9x days) who has become an iOS fanatic says that Windows is not for the casual user either. For the true casual user who just wants to use something and not have to know how any of it works, I’d have to agree, and I would suggest iOS before Windows or Linux, for sure. For somewhat less casual (but still within the “normal user” category more than “techie”) users, Linux can indeed work, as evidenced by those who use it and like it. I certainly could not say that without having their examples, as I am not a casual user, and my idea of what casual users want or need may not be in line with what they actually want or need!

anonymous wrote:

And don’t get me started with the hoops one must jump through to install 3rd party drivers.

“Must” is kind of an overly broad term.  There are times it can be hairy, but you usually won’t need third party drivers, as the kernel comes with the full set of drivers for nearly all hardware (but not printers… more on that below). It’s not like Windows where most drivers are released by the OEM of the device in question (even those distributed by MS)… in Linux, the drivers are tested by the kernel team for compatibility with that specific kernel each time there is a change, with that change only being included in the final product when the proposed change meets their standards, and when you update the kernel (which happens automatically if you accept all of the updates that are offered), the drivers that go with that kernel are automatically installed without you having to do anything.

I have not had any of the driver issues with the “in-tree” drivers (the ones included with the kernel) that I used to have with Windows, and certainly not having to do anything to keep them up to date, or conversely, to keep them working, is a good thing.

Any driver can be packaged in a way that makes it easy to install, or one that makes it hard to install. That’s true in Windows and Linux. If the maker of the driver packaged it in a .deb installer (the kind Ubuntu and derivatives like Mint use), you simply double-click it and it guides you through the process, much as an .exe or .msi packaged driver in Windows would work. A lot of the time, it’s even easier: just use a package manager like Synaptic (that comes with the distro) to find the thing you need and right click it, then select “mark for installation” and Apply.

If the OEM has chosen not to release a driver or program in an easy to use form like that, in Windows, Linux, or anything else, it is not the fault of the OS. Of course, that makes no difference to the user… he just wants something to work, and whose fault it is that it’s not easy makes no difference if it isn’t. With the Ubuntu-based distros I’ve used, it has not been necessary to use a “hard mode” driver. They’ve been just like the Windows ones… double click it and follow the prompts. That’s one benefit of using a distro based on the biggest one.

anonymous wrote:

The user is at the mercy of the “Linux community” to provide updates, if they don’t lose interest and go on to support the latest trend.

Unless you write the software yourself, you are always dependent on someone else to fix bugs and provide new features. If you’re using a small distro maintained by one person, there is a fairly significant chance they may lose interest, but the larger ones like Ubuntu and Fedora are driven by corporate interests, as is Windows, not just one guy who could get burned out or lose interest. The idea that Linux is a project of hobbyists is not true anymore. There’s a lot of corporate money in open-source software now, with paid developers working on the code, not just volunteers. There are a lot of hobbyists who are still involved with the process, but it doesn’t depend on them alone.

People losing interest and dropping their software product happens in the Windows world too. One of the programs that made later versions of Windows truly usable was Classic Shell, which had been around for years before Windows 10 arrived. The furious pace of updates to 10 that often broke Classic Shell (requiring constant changes to fix it) broke its developer’s interest too, and he apparently gave up. To his credit, rather than simply let the project die, he donated his code to the open-source community, so that it could always be continued by someone, and now his creation lives on as Open Shell. That’s the neat thing about open source… if one person bows out, it doesn’t mean the project has to die because it’s closed source and no one else has the source code, let alone the license to use it. Anyone can take it up and continue the process!

anonymous wrote:

Literally dozens of “flavors” of Linux to choose from, thus compounding the support environment.

Well, yes, there is that, but there’s also the flip side of being able to get what you want instead of what some corporate giant wants you to have (often for their own benefit, not yours). The fragmentation is often cited as one thing that harms Linux, but it’s also something that means people can get just what they want in an OS.

That’s also one of the reasons I like the Ubuntu family. Any of the stuff written for Ubuntu also will apply to other distros based on that version of Ubuntu. The distro I use, KDE Neon, is a fairly small one, which on its own could mean that it would be hard to find any help. But it’s based on Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS), which is huge, and nearly everything that is geared toward Ubuntu 20.04 will be true for Neon too.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Steve

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Regarding a possible switch from my current Windows 7 Pro to Linux, I am faced with an issue that I have never seen addressed in any article but must be of great interest to many other longtime Windows users, as well:  Will Linux recognize and allow me to edit the hundreds of .DOC, .DOCX and .JPG files I have painstakingly created and stored over the past thirty plus years?  I would love to avoid Windows 10 by moving to another OS (tried IBM’s OS/2 many years ago, remember that?), but recreating all those files on a new platform is out of the question.

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You need an app like Libre Office that can read document files.  Remember Windows doesn’t open up Word docs the best, Word opens them up. So you just need to find alternatives for what you use.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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CWO4Karpster

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Libre Office can open and save  WORD .doc and .docx (and Excel, PowerPoint) files.
The problem is formatting.
If the files are created in MS Office apps using MS proprietary fonts (for example), those fonts may not be available in Libre Office. So you will get substitute fonts that may change the appearance.
Another point, Libre Office may not respect all macros, depending on how they are constructed.

So experience may be the way to answer those questions. There is a Windows version of Libre Office you could use for testing.

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Bill C., SueW, Alex5723, CWO4Karpster, Microfix

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I found a while back, when I moved from Office 2010 plus! that if you format word/excel files with the Arial TTF on Windows (or previous versions, haven’t tested more recent Office versions or likely to) then open files with Libre Office for Windows or Linux (with MS-Fonts previously installed from the repo’s for Linux), the formatting is negligable with regards to word docs.
With Excel, however, it also depends on what codes are used to format cells within excel docs themselves. It can be done to a certain extent although that’s dependant on circumstances, patience and time.

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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wavy, Bill C., SueW, Ascaris

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Keep in mind also that many of the fonts in Windows can be installed in Linux as well. There is a package called ttf-mscorefonts-installer in the Ubuntu repo that will install a core set of MS fonts (including the once ubiquitous Tahoma) into Linux. This package is necessary to make some Windows programs display properly in WINE, as using approximations of the fonts used in Windows instead of the actual ones often has negative effects. If you install this package, you’ll get the MS license agreement pop-up, to which you will have to agree to proceed with the installation, in the usual MS fashion.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Microfix, Cybertooth, SueW

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Thank you, PKCano for the detailed response.  I can see that fonts will be an issue, as I have used a mix of basic Windows fonts and many other individualized fonts downloaded from web sites.  Also, formatting on some of my documents could turn into a nightmare.  For example, I have created song title pages (complex tables) for my Wurlitzer jukebox that involve exact spacing in order to print in the proper size to fit into display frames inside the jukebox’s viewing window.  Title-Card-CD-02

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If instead of moving 100% irreversibly to Linux, one installed it in dual-bootstrap on a Windows machine (assuming the machine has a reasonable amount of HD or SSD mass-storage capacity), then you can be running either Linux or Windows there and still be able to move files from one system to the other in a very easy way (the file system of Windows will be a folder in Linux). Not as convenient, perhaps, as what Ascaris describes in this thread further down: using a VM to run Windows and the Widows applications one needs, such as Office, for example; but there are some advantages running the real thing on “bare metal” and the inconveniences of dual-bootstrapping are minor ones.

One problem that is not inherent to dual bootstrapping but is going to be encountered with any combination of Linux and Windows (and macOS as well) is that they have their binaries differently organized, so software compiled for Windows, for example, does not run directly on Linux (some may run indirectly with WINE), and vice versa. But with dual-bootstrapping one can run Windows software on Windows, do all necessary with it there, then log off Windows and log into Linux and use the Windows files just created that can be read properly in Linux, leave the rest for next time on Windows.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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Steve

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Not much of a leap for me since I have used various Linux distros on and off since the early 2000’s.
In 2023 when support is gone for Windows 8.1, plan to use Linux for my daily use laptop.

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Steve, Microfix

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Sueska wrote:

In 2023 when support is gone for Windows 8.1, plan to use Linux for my daily use

Dito..Already using both currently and plan to go full Linux nearer EoS for Win8.1

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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[Ascaris]

On my daily-use PCs (at that time my desktop and my old Asus F8Sn laptop), I migrated to 8.1 after I had already determined I was not interested in Windows 10, and I’d made the decision to eventually go full Linux in the long term. I wanted to have the time to make the move at my leisure… but it happened faster than I thought. One day I realized I had not booted Windows in several weeks, and that I was already using Linux more or less full time. That was even before Windows 7 ran out of time.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Ascaris. Reason: Not from the department of redundancy department

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I’ve dabbled in Linux since about 2005 (remember Breezy Badger), and I do mean dabbled and am by no means an expert at it.

The points the article makes are all valid, but it does not address the shortage of specific application software.  While there are alternative apps for many windows applications, certain apps, such as Turbo Tax have no Linux equivalent (I realize that tax software providers offer online tax preparation alternatives, but many don’t feel secure with that option).

While the lack of application software for Linux has been an issue since the beginning, as time has gone by there are fewer and fewer apps without serviceable Linux equivalents.  As more users move to Linux, developers take more of an interest in offering such software.  Unfortunately, it has, and is, taking a long time for more to be available.

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Things like tax software should run just fine within a virtual machine. Things like that are why I keep Windows around in a VM… while it would be fantastic to be completely MS-free, that’s not always possible when many software publishers don’t release Linux versions of their wares.

I don’t usually have to use it, but when I run into the case of a Windows program that I need, the VM is available, and I don’t have to put up with the Windows antics full time just to be able to use programs like that every now and then. It takes about five seconds for my Windows VM to start, and when it does, it’s right there at the desktop, ready to begin… no concerns about whether it’s going to decide to install something that takes an hour when I boot it up. It’s already booted up and ready to go; that is the state it’s saved in within the VM. And when I am done using the Windows thing, I click the little X to close it, and a popup appears asking me if I want to save the new machine state or restore the old one. I can have it pick up right from that point the next time I use the VM, or if I am done with what I am doing and I’ve saved whatever work I was doing in “the cloud” or outside of the VM, I can just revert to the state it was in when I began using it. It’s by far the best way to use Windows, IMO.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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WStoyclyde

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Ascaris wrote:

just yesterday I finally removed Windows 10 from my Dell G3

Have you asked for refund from Microsoft (about ~$50) ?

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[Ascaris]

No… it’s been about 2 years by now since I bought the G3. I figure the time window for that would have closed long ago!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Ascaris.

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[Alex5723]

anonymous wrote:

There are some aspects of it which may prevent it from achieving dominance.

achieving dominance on desktops. Linux OS rules the world.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Alex5723.

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Ascaris

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CWO4Karpster wrote:

Will Linux recognize and allow me to edit the hundreds of .DOC, .DOCX and .JPG files I have painstakingly created and stored over the past thirty plus years? I would love to avoid Windows 10 by moving to another OS (tried IBM’s OS/2 many years ago, remember that?), but recreating all those files on a new platform is out of the question.

We have had good (though not perfect) success with SoftMaker Office on a Kubuntu Linux system. Most of the time everything works fine, but once in a while we’ll run into some weird incompatibility issue. In our experience, SMO is much more highly compatible with MS Office than is LibreOffice.

If you’re considering switching to Linux, you also have the option of using WINE to run the MS Office programs that you know. So, word-processing documents should not be an impediment to your making the switch.

Regarding .JPG files, most Linux distros come with at least one image viewing/editing program included. On my Kubuntu system, I can open JPGs with Gwenview, GIMP, Pinta, Okular, or Krita. (Not all of these were preloaded with the OS installation ISO, but were added later.)

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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WStoyclyde, Ascaris

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With SoftMaker Office, how does it receive security updates? It sounds interesting based upon what you said and I looked at their website.

I have been having decent success working between Office 2010 and LibreOffice 6.4.7. My largest issue is the font compatibilities for Write – Word is a learning curve if you use lots of fonts. I usually use Arial or Times New Roman in Word depending on the level of formality and avoid Calibri like the plague.

The Calc – Excel so far is OK. I do not have real extensive calculations going between different spreadsheet anymore so that is not an issue. Calc will warn about too many cells in my Excel documents, but that is due to how Excel works. I have yet to actually hit the limits. I have yet to create a Calc document from scratch under Linux and then use it in MSOffice.

I have less experience with the Powerpoint – Impress interoperability.

For images, I am learning GIMP. In Windows I used Paint Shop Pro and Canon software and have limited Photoshop experience with the last version before that adopted the SaaS mess.

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Sometimes (each time?) when you open a SoftMaker Office application, SMO searches online for updates and reports if there is one. You can then ignore it or tell it to take you to the downloads page on the SMO site. You pick the appropriate package format for your Linux version (for the Ubuntu family, it’s the .DEB file) and, after downloading, you double-click on it and the new SMO version will install over the current one.

The process isn’t as quick ‘n’ easy as MS Office patching via Windows Updates, but it’s not hard either. And you can do it on your schedule instead of on Microsoft’s schedule, or not at all if you prefer.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Bill C.

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You really have to try it and see if you have the patience to learn a bunch of new stuff.  It’s not hard but terminology is somewhat different and packages are heavily biased toward geeky stuff.  Graphics hardware support is, yeah, it’s whatever.  Lots of limitations, may be OK or not.  There’s absolutely no difference in privacy while browsing, you still have to take precautions with your data.  There’s gimp and libre and, uh gimp and libre.

Easiest way to experiment is use a separate device for just Linux; you’ll be reinstalling your destroyed OS and distro switching a LOT if you’re detemined to succeed.  Try some phone distros, tee hee.

Linux is great for servers and networking.  It’s nowhere near what users brought up on MS, Android or Apple would want for everyday usage. If CLI is a no-no, you’ll never be able to do some things, regardless of distro.

Depending on the distro, updates can be far more destructive than Windows or much smoother.  Rolling releases are dicey.  Some of the developer teams do bizarre things; some actually seem to listen to users.

OSX is Linux made into something earth people can use.   So’s Android, so is the stuff behind the easy to use GUI’s on your wi fi routers (well, easy to change, not easy to understand), it’s all around but rarely made into something the masses can digest, still loaded with ~’s and /’s or is it \’s?   $…what’s that????

What’s a distro anyway?  Desktop?  That’s separate?  Windows combined all the parts so well, most users will never know it’s an assemblage of things.

The most popular distro has the worst desktop ever devised, Gnome.

If you insist, Mint w/Cinnamon desktop is a good start.  KDE neon is far and away the best distro I’ve ever used, Plasma’s beautiful and so customizable.  Has a weird installer but all else is as easy as Mint.  My home server runs headless Ubuntu.  Otherwise Windows is what we all use, with all the garbage removed or locked up.

Buy a Mac and tell everyone you use Linux.  You’ll get familiarity and double snob appeal.

🙂

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Steve, klang

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anonymous wrote:

The most popular distro has the worst desktop ever devised, Gnome.

Could have said the same myself. Agreed completely on that part! Why, of all desktops, did they choose GNOME for Ubuntu?

If you insist, Mint w/Cinnamon desktop is a good start.

Agreed again! It’s my favorite of the Mint bunch, and I used it for a while while KDE still had some rough edges I didn’t want to live with.

KDE neon is far and away the best distro I’ve ever used, Plasma’s beautiful and so customizable. Has a weird installer but all else is as easy as Mint.

Agreed again again. Once those rough edges were gone, there was no way I would settle for less than KDE Plasma, and Neon is where you get the latest KDE stuff over a stable Ubuntu base, which is a great combination for me.

When KDE Connect broke in Neon and Kubuntu 20.04, I briefly went over to Fedora (with Plasma) to regain the use of Connect, I really missed Neon and the Ubuntu base. There are some nice things about Fedora (the update widget that means I never have to look at Discover would be much appreciated in Neon!), but DNFDragora, Fedora’s graphical package manager, is far, far inferior to Synaptics; SELinux is a huge pain in the rear compared to AppArmor; and the pace of kernel updates (and the old ones vanishing from the repo) is faster than most software can keep up with. Fedora 32 also took about three times as long as Neon to boot on the same hardware.

I was glad when I found the fix (and since I had reported the bug to both KDE and Ubuntu, I informed both of them of my finding), and while Neon pushed out an update to fix it, Kubuntu 20.04, as far as I can tell, is still broken, a year down the road, even though I handed them the solution. It just requires updating libssl and openssl, version 1.1.1f for both, to something newer, which Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Manjaro were already using. I used the Debian Sid versions (in .deb form), at 1.1.1h, while I believe KDE Neon just issued a fixed version of 1.1.1f to retain full compatibility with the Ubuntu 20.04 base of Neon.

As far as the command line… I seldom use it from day to day. I use Synaptics (package manager) in lieu of apt (or pkcon on Neon), and I have graphical tools to show a bunch of other stuff. There are times where the command line is simpler or when I don’t have a graphical tool, but I had those moments fairly often in Windows also, and there have been some anecdotes from Windows people that suggest that some administrative tasks that used to be possible by GUI now require the command line in Windows.

For people like the woman in the other thread who is struggling with a Windows laptop that only has a 28GB (likely GiB, though MS calls it GB) drive, where some of us suggested Linux instead, the idea would not be for the individual to be performing admin tasks. For browsing and moving files around in a “regular user” way, she would not need to mess with the command line.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I’m all Windows/Mint(20.0) dual boot on my old Windows 7 laptops with 7 never allowed  online when the laptop’s booted into 7!  And I have one Windows 10/1909 Home laptop that’s not getting updated beyond 10/1909 Home and that’s dual booting With Mint 20.1. Also I have a new ASRock Desk Mini X300 bare bones system that’s running a Ryzen 3400G desktop APU with Vega 11 integrated graphics and that’s the only machine that’s running Mint 20.1 only as that system shipped without an OS so no Windows 10 there as I’m not paying for 10, in cash or in my personal metrics!

Linux Mint is sufficient for me but I can understand some folks being forced to use Windows but I do nothing online like banking/other that may force me to use Windows 10 and Linux Mint is fine for my usage as I’m using Opensource Applications mostly and have been even on Windows 7 where I have used opensource  there mostly as well! I just do not have any desire to keep Windows 10 Updated further and for Windows 7(EOL) that’s not provided  anyways as I’m not an 7/ESU customer. But even 10/1909 Home on my newest laptop is no longer getting updated and is not allowed online so now on all my systems all I have to manage for updates is the Mint installs and that’s easy to deal with when I’m ready and only when I’m ready as I’m in the drivers seat there!

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I’m slowly trying to learn Mint, but it’s probably just going to be for this laptop. Years ago, I had a graphics workstation custom built so my wife, who works with 2D and 3D graphics as well as CG animation, could have the machine of her desire. She also wanted to get scans too, good ones, of her oils/acrylics/watercolors to preserve if the originals were destroyed in a catastrophe. (Also, I could do a LOT of things with music and sound on it.) 🙂

Sad to say that, even in 2021, Linux STILL has a problem with drivers for programs and hardware that are supposed work with it, and graphics software and hardware? We have probably well into four figures of graphics as well as animation software that only runs on Windows XP that we would be hard pressed to replace.

(And believe it or not, that machine was so heavily gunned when it was designed and built that it STILL outstrips a lot of newer equipment in terms of rendering speed. (How? Well, you start with a 750 Watt power supply, and just keep throwing money into that custom steel 4-fan case…yes, the power bills; definitely not very Green. Sorry.)

So we’re pretty much stuck on Windows XP on The Fire-Breather 2 (as we call it) and Win 7 for this laptop. But I continue to learn Linux from a usb boot thumb drive, at least for the laptop, as much of the software on this thing can be easily be replaced by open source stuff I already use in Windows. LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.

And I’d like to get away from Windows, as far as I can, for routine stuff on this laptop. Win 7 was the end for me. After years of hearing the howls of the wounded on the Win 10 battlefield uh-uh. Nope. (Especially the newest bug ala’ NTFS corruption..gee, a self-corrupting OS!)

But Linux is a new trick, and I am an old dog…give me time!

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330, Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Greenhorn
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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doriel

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Good review. I agree, when something goes wrong in GNU/Linux, ordinary PC user is often doomed. And I agree with the statement, that ordinary users can have problems with some custom built systems, when dealing with driver issues. But still for me the backwards compatibility is great. Try to install W10 build 1909 on few years old HW, you will face lot of problems.
On GNU/Linux, high-end technology, brand new hotherboards and enormous RAMs and SSDs can cause problem, simply because its brand new and all bugs are not solved yet. Same with new drivers. But servers run Linux all over the world too, which proves, that it can run powerful hardware indeed.

Sad to say that, even in 2021, Linux STILL has a problem with drivers for programs and hardware that are supposed work with it

Same as Windows does. Windows can even wipe your drivers without your consent and break functioning HW. For me, the most reliable is iOS. Simply because its built 1:1 with its HW.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Bill C., Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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doriel wrote:

Good review. I agree, when something goes wrong in GNU/Linux, ordinary PC user is often doomed. And I agree with the statement, that ordinary users can have problems with some custom built systems, when dealing with driver issues.

…

On GNU/Linux, high-end technology, brand new hotherboards and enormous RAMs and SSDs can cause problem, simply because its brand new and all bugs are not solved yet.

Yes, and I have seen an example of this in my new Dell XPS 13, which uses the brand new Tiger Lake platform. This laptop came with Linux preinstalled, while all my others have been Windows machines that I converted to Linux. That had one very interesting (to me) effect: it allowed me to inspect the Dell installation of Ubuntu before I wiped it and installed the very same Neon setup I would have if the PC started with Windows.

Had I not had that OEM Dell install of Ubuntu 20.04 to refer to, I would not have known that in order to have the laptop work properly when I disconnect the power, I would need to use the 5.6 OEM kernel. From what I understand, the OEM kernel is where various OEMs that want to preinstall Linux can put their custom modifications to make them work properly before those same changes are (eventually) incorporated into the mainline Linux kernel.

In this case, when I installed the 5.8 Ubuntu kernel, the laptop would not recognize that the power was disconnected. It pops up a message that says, “The laptop is plugged in, but it is not supplying enough power and the battery is still discharging,” or something like that. It’s completely on battery at that point, with no cords of any kind plugged into the laptop.

If I use the 5.6 OEM kernel, though, it works properly when I unplug it. Had this laptop not come with 5.6 OEM, I would never have thought to try it. Eventually, whatever Dell did with the OEM kernel to make it work will presumably work its way into the mainline kernel, but it hasn’t yet.

Just as Dell or other OEMs make whatever changes are needed to various drivers or bits of Windows to make it work with their PCs, Dell did the same to make this PC work with Ubuntu. That OEM kernel is in the Ubuntu repo and is available to anyone who wants it, but you’d have to know it was needed first, and I sure would not have if Dell didn’t do it for me in the OEM installation.

It’s quite possible that if you bought a brand new PC like this one and installed box-stock Windows 10, it might not work either, but the version you get from Dell does, which is all most people need, since the large majority of people never change the OS on a PC. Eventually those changes will presumably work their way into the standard Windows installation in the same way, but it might take time. (This is speculation, not based on any specific knowledge of MS or Windows).

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote:

Sad to say that, even in 2021, Linux STILL has a problem with drivers for programs and hardware that are supposed work with it, and graphics software and hardware?

I’d be happy to try to tackle that problem if you like over on the Linux forum. I’m no expert, but two heads are better than one. What hardware that’s supposed to work isn’t?

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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Ascaris wrote:

I’d be happy to try to tackle that problem if you like over on the Linux forum. I’m no expert, but two heads are better than one. What hardware that’s supposed to work isn’t?

Thanks, Ascaris, tell me where the forum is, and I’ll pop over when the stars align. Right now the pandemic and several other things in this thing we call “Life” (including a car that’s enabling my mechanic buy a chalet in the Alps) have been keeping me fully occupied.
You know the old “When I have the time and money, I don’t have the strength; when I have the strength, I don’t have the time or money,” thing goes! 🙂
Thank you!!

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330, Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Greenhorn
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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Sure! It’s under Support/ Non-Windows operating systems/Linux:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/forum/askwoody-support/other-platforms-for-windows-wonks/linux-for-windows-wonks/

 

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I’ve been a full time Linux user for 2 years now. Both as a  system administrator and business user. For those who are stating that there’s no good alternatives for Microsoft Office, they should try using Evolution as an alternative for Microsoft Outlook and LibreOffice or WPS Office for documents.

I’ve also been running several pieces of Microsoft Windows business software (Mostly .NET related software) using wine-staging and all I can say is that it just works

I’ve been amazed by how well WPS Office renders most Microsoft Office documents. Not to mention there’s Microsoft Office 365 (Microsoft Office in the web browser) and Microsoft Office 365 kind of works using wine-staging too.

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I’ve tried three different distros of Linux on four occasions, and in each, found Linux to be lacking, and not a desirable alternative to Windows.  I run a very customized Windows installation that bypasses many of Microsoft’s user “refinements”.  Consequently, my Windows experience is 99.9% hassle-free, and I can handle the little infrequent blips without difficulty.

For me to make the Linux leap, Linux would have to an improvement over my Windows experience, and it doesn’t even come close.  In my view, if Linux was truly as good as many of its proponents say it is, Windows would have a small desktop-market share and Linux would be king.  Free Linux has not replaced paid Windows, and there are many and obvious reasons for that.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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doriel

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“Better,” of course, is a matter of opinion, but there are many examples in nearly every market where something that is “better” by some metric does not have the biggest market share, or often much market share at all (like Firefox, IMO), or conversely, where the most used product is just bad.

I found Internet Explorer 6 to be horrible even when it represented 95% of the browser market. Now it’s pretty widely accepted that Internet Explorer was bad, even back when nearly everyone used it, but you never would have known that in the early 2000s!

Now I find Chrome to be pretty awful to use, even though 70-something percent of people consider it their top choice. Does that 70% imply superiority? Not to me. I know what I like and what I don’t, and if someone else disagrees, well, that’s just fine by me too.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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wavy, Steve, Bill C.

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bbearren wrote:

I run a very customized Windows installation that bypasses many of Microsoft’s user “refinements”. Consequently, my Windows experience is 99.9% hassle-free, and I can handle the little infrequent blips without difficulty.

I can only surmise that you are a computer scientist or other highly trained computer professional to be able to modify Windows to your liking and achieve that kind of Win 10 bliss.  While I’m glad for you, just a relatively few people are able or willing to do what you do.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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To bbearen: Would any of your “customized refinements”, assuming you would be willing to reveal them, be of any assistance to, or achievable by, a non-techie user like me? Just curious.

Peace, CAS

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CAS wrote:

To bbearen: Would any of your “customized refinements”, assuming you would be willing to reveal them, be of any assistance to, or achievable by, a non-techie user like me? Just curious.

Freely available on my ad-free website.  However, the instruction set is targeted primarily for advanced users.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect a non-techie user to tackle Linux, either.

 

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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CAS

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I came here to post that Linux has a lot of qualities, but it isn’t more secure than Windows. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

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You need to read the Security section of this thread:

Windows to Linux? Are you ready to take the leap? By Sandra Henry-Stocker

I think you need to be a Plus member to read it though.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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The only reason Linux is more secure is that virtually no one uses it as a desktop OS.

The other three reasons listed there are nonsense.

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Charlie wrote:

I can only surmise that you are a computer scientist or other highly trained computer professional to be able to modify Windows to your liking and achieve that kind of Win 10 bliss. While I’m glad for you, just a relatively few people are able or willing to do what you do.

Highly skilled, though not necessarily highly trained.

The thing about it for me that some might find a bit odd is that I had just successfully purged all of the worst bits from Windows 10 and made it into a (for me) much more desirable thing right when I decided to throw in the towel and leave the Windows platform that had been my computing home for 25 years at that point.

In reality, I merely maintained the same standards and expectations I had for those 25 years. I didn’t leave Windows as much as Windows left me, as the adage popularized by Ronald Reagan goes.

This was back in 2015, after the Threshold 2 update arrived. Prior to that, I successfully ported my Windows 8.1 custom theme (which was itself ported from its original Windows 7 version) over to 10, but it broke when TH2 came along. Otherwise, I had all of my old “fixes” from TH1 set up once again: 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, Old New Explorer, and Classic Shell were installed and configured, and most of all, I’d used a neat Powershell script (and possibly install_wim_tweak; I can’t remember if I needed it yet at that point) to eliminate all of the non-removable (by normal means) “apps,” much as I had once used Revenge of Mozilla to get IE out of Windows 98 SE (which even Microsoft couldn’t do, according to Bill Gates and his testimony before Congress).

Edge, Cortana, Windows Store, and all of that stuff was gone, and Windows still worked fine. I couldn’t get it to crash or generate an error message despite all of those “system apps” not being there when the OS expected them to be. All in all, it seemed a great success for the “rip them out the hard way if they don’t give you an easy way” method.

I got to thinking about that. It would not be unusual to have some bit of the OS itself, or some third party program I had not yet installed, that would rely on some of those “apps” that were not meant to be removable. If they were removable, the authors of those programs would probably put in a bit of code that would check for their presence and let the user know that he needed to install whatever the missing app was for the program to work. There would be no reason to do that if, as far as the developer of that program was concerned, the app it relied on was always going to be there.

So while everything seemed to work now, I could never be assured it would remain so. Some Windows update could change this, or I may install some program in the future that relies on one of the forcibly evicted apps, and what’s worse, I’d have no good way to troubleshoot it. If the apps were removable by normal means, they would probably also be reinstallable by normal means, which I could do for testing. But since the apps were never meant to be removed, there’s no way to put them back in for testing either. Every glitch I had to troubleshoot from that point forward could be a result of some app not being there.

On top of that, the scope of the changes in Threshold 2 demonstrated that any “hack” I used to make Windows 10 more tolerable now could very well break when the next unwanted (but necessary, if you want the security updates) feature update came along. This proved to be the case with nearly every release of Windows 10, so much so that Classic Shell dev Ivo Beltchev burned out and gave up trying to keep up with it. That’s just one of many modifications that have to be made, and any one of them could be broken by a future update, and any one of their developers could just as easily decide it was not worth it to keep up.

That Threshold 2 update changed a lot of stuff, including breaking my freshly ported theme (which worked on the initial release, Threshold 1/10240/1507).  It was not just going to be third parties like Ivo Beltchev who were going to have to keep up with the Windows changes… it was me personally as well, and that would depend on my theme editor (paid software, and at the same time possibly the buggiest program I ever saw that wasn’t pre-alpha) continuing to support each new version of 10. The odds of that only barely maintained program going the way of Classic Shell seemed quite high.

I noticed, of course, that among the stuff TH2 changed were not any of the things people had been yelling about, like a master OFF for telemetry on all versions and full control over updates like we had in every other Windows release. MS clearly had no intention of listening to customers on those things, as we got all kinds of excuses about why we misunderstood Microsoft’s intentions with the telemetry and how it was really okay (which would be great if we’d asked for more excuses, but we hadn’t… we’d asked for an OFF switch, and we didn’t get one).

In the coming releases, we got stuff like Timeline (which apparently is now being removed, having served its purpose) and gaming mode, stuff that no one had asked for, while the stuff that was most asked for just generated either excuses or (…crickets…).

I was going to have to keep modifying Windows each six months just to maintain status quo, let alone make advances in how well Windows serves me rather than how well it serves Microsoft. Windows 10, as I had it at that moment, was much improved over the way MS had released it, but it still wasn’t what I would call “good.” Getting it to a state of “good,” then keeping it there, was going to be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, as ungood bits would pop up all over the place, like when MS used “sync provider notifications” to send ads for OneDrive directly into people’s File Explorers. Look, a mole! Whack it! Problem solved… but you know how the game of whack-a-mole goes.

Taking an operating system designed to serve the needs of Microsoft and twisting it to be one that serves my needs was going to be a never-ending battle.

That was when I saw the futility of it all. Like Joshua (the computer) said in WarGames, the only winning move was not to play.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Charlie, doriel, Cybertooth

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Ascaris wrote:

Highly skilled, though not necessarily highly trained.

No such training was available.  I’m self-taught, a learning process I very much enjoyed, because the reward is a more stable and reliable Windows environment that works my way.  My methods don’t involve tweaking apps/programs, with the exception of O&O Shutup10.

Ascaris wrote:

Taking an operating system designed to serve the needs of Microsoft and twisting it to be one that serves my needs was going to be a never-ending battle.

Such has not proven to be the case for me.  I have developed a comprehensive set of registry edits that easily maintain my own configuration after each major update of Windows 10 with a simple registry import; one and done.  Everything else about my Windows configuration remains unchanged.

I’m quite looking forward to 21H1.

But my bottom line on Linux remains the same.  Linux cannot do for me what my configuration of Windows does for me; Linux cannot match, much less improve upon my Windows experience.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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I have used linux for 20 years I hate windows and will only use it when I need MS Office or Quickbooks or whatever windows only software.  I agree with what was said about teaching children to use linux there would be more adults that are accustomed to it by now.

I didn’t like when debian went to systemd and there are things about it I’m not sure about (canonical etc) but compared to microsoft it’s like a beautiful dream.

 

Never had a blue screen of death or kernel failure in linux.

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Ascaris

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Ascaris wrote:

I had once used Revenge of Mozilla to get IE out of Windows 98 SE (which even Microsoft couldn’t do, according to Bill Gates and his testimony before Congress).

I remember when the antitrust trial was taking place. I recall hearing on the news that Bill Gates had testified along the lines that Internet Explorer couldn’t be removed from Windows because it was part of the OS. His specific analogy was that IE was like the radio in a car.

My reaction was, “Wait a minute… so Bill, are you saying that if I take the radio out of my car, the car won’t start any more? Or are you saying that you have now built a car that won’t start unless I keep the factory radio in place??” Neither possibility sounded very flattering of Mr. Gates.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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wavy, Steve, Charlie

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Nice @Ascaris, especially that whack-a-mole part. Its very good methaphore.

I consider the situation around Windows to be little bizzare. I admit, that Windows 10 came a long way and they are waaaaaay better than used to be, but I still cant see any obvious goal towards Windows are heading.
It seems to me, like its all “made on spot”. There are still twists and turns in the Windows development. It looks to me, that MS comes with some massive campaing to promote something – Cortana (Bing), Windows Store, Edge (legacy/chromium),.. and after some time, it changes again.

Calm down MS, think about it. Do you want to be world-wide OS providing healthy environment for developpers and make money for being reliable and favourite OS?
Or do you want to compete with others in creating “the most used webbrowser”, “best search engine ever”, “best voice activated assistant” and so on?

I cant see what Windows really is. Is it marketing tool? Is it spying tool? Dont know honestly. But it seems to me that purpose that it should serve in the first place is not so good as others – iOS or GNU/Linux distros.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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doriel wrote:

I consider the situation around Windows to be little bizzare. I admit, that Windows 10 came a long way and they are waaaaaay better than used to be, but I still cant see any obvious goal towards Windows are heading.

I don’t really care about Microsoft’s goals.  I have Windows 10 configured in such a way that updates/upgrades can’t really interfere, and Windows continues to perform as I expect.

At worst, the “Special Folders” get re-introduced; that’s my only whack-a-mole.  I can remove them with a single registry import.  Cortana service remains suspended and unused, Chredge is not an issue as Firefox is my default browser.  I have uninstalled the apps I don’t want, and they stay uninstalled after each update/upgrade.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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doriel

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