Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever Come October 14, 2025, Windows 10 support dies. Despite that, more users than ever are using Windows 10 rather than moving to Windows 11. I can't say that I blame them. Windows 11 sucks almost as much as Vista – remember that stinker? In addition, Windows 11 is less of a desktop operating system than it is a remote Microsoft …
A recent poll in the Fediverse had 81% running Linux. Should it be rightly be renamed the Nerdiverse?. The remainder was pretty evenly split between Windows and Mac.
Now to the real battle. How does one convince Gnome based users to see the true light: KDE? [Retires to his NZ bash-proof bunker]
Unlike Win 8, 10, 11 you are not trapped (You could make XP, Vista & Win7 GUI/Desktop easily like Win98/Win2K without 3rd party software.
On most Linux distros you can install more than one entire desktop system and easily swap. I use Mate, but also have Cinnamon and others installed.
Linux is fine with 2G RAM as long as you've not too many tabs open in Firefox.
There is now little support (but some) for 32 bit, so 20 years old is pushing it. Most popular SW is available on ARM and AMD x64. The 64 bit Linux runs 32 bit WINE if you add an environment for x86 first. VB6 programs that won't run on any 64 bit Windows due to ocx like for RS232 serial (map to any linux USB or serial port) work on WINE.
If you have 16 G RAM then you can have VMs for XP, Win7 and Win10, just in case, though sadly DirectX was removed for XP on Vbox.
"Today, anyone smart enough to use Windows, a very low bar indeed, can use desktop Linux."
I disagree. Using Linux requires frontal lobe capacity. I know too many mouth-breathers who have begged me for Windows assistance over the decades. Windows thinks for them and they deserve each other.
... but what Linux really needs here is a Linfluencer on TikTok to demonstrate how to do this to the cool kids, so they can adapt theirs (and their parents) computers.
Count me out, I am too boring for that (I have a teenage daughter, so this opinion counts).
This, writ large.
An OS should be boring: it should allow the user to start and run the software they want without getting in the way or being 'an experience' in its own right - and Linux desktops are exceptionally boring in this regard! Yes, having Linfluencers - I'm so nicking that! - is key. If the great and the good saw their on-line gods firing up a *nix desktop with an-almost throwaway line like 'and I'll just start my Mint box up and show you this for lulz' (forgive my street talk: I'm not exactly core demographic) then I think that'd only do good.
Someone, somewhere, completely lost the plot, and tried to make the stage the star of the show..
I dont think influencers are the answer - but I respond negatively to blatant stupidity, so influencers rarely get to finish their pitches..
The OS is there to provide a setting that your work is done on.
It should be a servant, not a master (it can spy for the mothership just as offensively from either role, so that point is irrelevant)
OK, you're point is well taken. But you have to understand how the world works in the 21st Century. The move away from Micros~1 will have to be led by by the Millennials and Zots (especially the Zots), and given that the average Millennial/Zot spends...what is it 5-7 hrs. daily with his/her nose buried in some (anti)social medium or another (or both). If you want to reach these folks, you have to reach them in their sandbox. A "Linfluencer" (what a turn of a phrase; I too, am totally nicking that!) would be ideal in trying to gently nudge these impressionable yout' away from the dark side.
Besides, what better way to help disinfect Tiktok than to put some actual information onto that cesspit?
"You obviously DO NOT HAVE a teenage Daughter ... or Son !!!"
Correct. I have a teenage granddaughter and grandson instead.
Granddaughter discusses sewing - which is definitely cool - with SWMBO on an almost mutual level. According to her, her boyfriend - a history student - finds out local history website cool.
"As soon as you 'ASK'"
Did you note the verb I actually used in the OP?
I did !!!
I thought 'ASK' was gentler on the blood pressure for ALL :)
I take it that you have not had to deal with a 'Stroppy Teenager' ... 100% full-on Strop is 'Draining' to say the least :)
Some people are lucky & some are not, I thought I would err on the 'not so lucky side'.
Some of my friends were a nightmare, when in their teens, and I actually had sympathy with their parents !!!
It is not 'simply' a parenting issue, as children in the same family can be at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Deconstructing a joke, in passing, ALWAYS kills it dead !!!
:)
Don't think they said to *ask*, just get them to do it. Best way would be to tell them you don't approve of them using it because it doesn't have the Windows security software that lets you control what content can be accessed online. Watch as they quickly tell all their friends how great/cool Linux is because their parents don't like it and can't control what they do on it (even if that's not necessarily the case)
One major problem - and I do not wish to start a fight - is that there's far too much choice in the *nix world. Would that Linfluencer promote Mint? Why not Ubuntu or, perhaps, Debian? MX is my choice but it's a choice based on some boring technical criteria that a Win-user wouldn't care about or understand - but I'm willing to bet that half of us would fight the other half to the death over such issues (read any thread on VI, systemd, pipewire et al if you need reminding how uglypassionate we can make it)!
Then there's the thorny choice of desktop: Xfce is loved by many - but so are a handful of others. To get a disgruntled-and-looking-to-change Redmond user onto a *nix, we - the assembled mob of *nix users - need to put aside our 'discussions' about these technical differences and accept a common entry platform, get behind it and then willingly install/teach it.
Thus the beauty of Linux. Use the distro and UI of your choice. Not the single option that someone in Redmond deems the One True Way. We have a common base; under the covers, Linux is pretty much Linux. There's no fight needed -- I like vim, you like EMACS, I like Mint, you like RHEL, and we can all move ahead without compromise.
What you see as an advantage many non-techies see as confusing. They want choice but only in an undemanding way. So it would better if there were only one flavour of nix on offer on multiple device types.
To actually get people to switch you might need something like a "Linux coffee morning". Bring your kit down and someone will sit with them and help them upgrade and walk them through the basics.
I don't doubt that plenty of people's grand-folks are happy on linux, this is likely because all IT is confusing to the average elderly person so it's no more difficult to teach them to use a nix machine than a Windows PC or a Mac.
If kids at school were taught about this as well, maybe build and use a nix machine as part of a basic computing course, rather then simply taught how to visit an app store; which seems to be how it works right now.
"I don't doubt that plenty of people's grand-folks are happy on linux, this is likely because all IT is confusing to the average elderly person so it's no more difficult to teach them to use a nix machine than a Windows PC or a Mac."
My grandchildrens' grandfather is happy on Linux because he's been using Unix from 7th Ed in the 1980s through various System III & V and prior to Linux on the laptop it was SCO Openserver 5 with development tools for Informix. Informix, although not much used these days, is still on the Linux laptop.
Windows, OTOH, has become a pain. W2K was more or less OK (did some development on that) but since then it's been downhill all the way.
Do not think we haven't all used computers in the past. They've been in offices for quite a while now.
My solution was simple: each child got to specify and build their own desktop computer to take to uni, plus install a Linux distro on it (and on an associated netbook - back when they were a thing).
Result, relaxed familiarity with IT matters (hard and soft), broadened horizons, and ongoing career opportunities (not necessarily IT focussed).
Turned out that daughter's course, later on, actually depended on a bunch of FLOSS Linux tools, which she was able to seamlessly pick up and use. Unlike a bunch of her fellow students who suddenly found themselves having to get to grips with an OS many of them didn't even know existed, let alone manage the academic apps.
The lack of a coherent UI, unlike Windows and macOS, makes developing Linux desktop applications much harder. No surpire most users use the CLI instead. And that's the reason many application use Java frameworks (or web ones like Electron) to avoid that. It is true that Microsoft is doing its best to achieve chaos on Windows too (there must be a lot of young Linux fans there, who can't understand GUIs), but Win32 is still there. macOS avoids that wholly.
It's ironic anyway that Linux worshippers advocates of a single unified kernel OS for everything (no choice allowed there), but then want thousands of different GUIs. While most users can't give a damn about the kernel, but want a common UI thay can use easily everywhere. That's after all why CUA rules were devised.
That's what happened when first the idiotic web UI were taken as a model, then the smartphones ones. The problem are those users who think fancy fisher-price UIs are cool. Anyway many Linux desktop developers really need to follow a UI 101 course, because they don't understand the very basics. Do you think Microsoft is the spawn of Satan (and their latest idea really ugly)? Look at Apple, then, please... but don't reinvent the wheel, in various quadrangular forms.
Take Nautilus. It's almost unsable. Microsoft is trying to make Windows Explorer unusable as well, but it will take time to make it as ugly as Nautilus. And that's fhe first thing many users coming from Windows have to deal with.
> It's ironic anyway that Linux worshippers advocates of a single unified kernel OS for everything (no choice allowed there),
Sorry, but plenty of us here are using a FreeBSD kernel with the usual GNU/"Linux" frontend, of course there is a choice allowed there!
And plenty of macOS users use the CLI - in a much higher proportion in my experience than Windows users. My "Operating Systems" lecturer at uni used macOS when teaching us about the UNIX VFS, shells, kernels, POSIX, etc.
yep. I run windows and mac both. I am one of those that you are trying to get to switch. I even loaded and tried unix and linux in the past. What I found was that there were a thousand different versions to dig through and study, and then there were a thousand different warez to dig through and study, only to find that most of todays high end creative software does NOT actually run on Unix/linux. I understand times have changed, and mint looks the part to me, but I'm going to have to put the effort into digging out a computer, loading it up, and then seeing what software I use DOESN'T work. I'm not talking about games here. I'm talking high end video and audio systems. I know some DEVS will make a (L)unix version, but not a lot. You need to consolidate from an outsiders perspective. Give the DEVS something to build on. They are not going to keep up with an OS that the majority isn't playing on.
It always comes down to applications. If a user has fairly modest needs, then everything in the article applies.
I love Mint and have it running on a few PCs, but my main computer runs Windows. What keeps me there is the unavailability of certain programs that I use regularly - mainly for photo editing. I have played with all the open source editors commonly cited (GIMP, RawTherapee, darktable,etc). Most of them are packed with sliders whose function is totally opaque to me as a seasoned photographer. GIMP is comparatively user-friendly, but lacks features commercial software can perform without resorting to clunky plugins that haven't been updated since 2010. Try stitching multiple images together to create a panoramic photo in GIMP, as I attempted last weekend. That's a super easy task in Affinity Photo or Photoshop.
None of the image editing applications I use in Windows run (at least not their recent versions) under WINE. I've checked the database for all of them. I've even tried running some of them inside a Windows VM on Linux, and found that doesn't work well. Affinity Photo, for example, crashes just trying to open an image.
If we're going to advocate for Linux, we should make a point of asking people what they use their computers for. Linux isn't currently the answer for everyone.
I wouldn't call Hugin "easy". It has an "unfriendly" UI and it is to get the wrong result. To get a decent stich of a six image panorama with Hugin it took me a long time to set points and correct the image manually in some places because it couldn't get correcty some boats with ropes and flags. The same panorama created with Lightroom takes a few seconds.
That said if you take the time to learn it, and are willingly to spend some time to create a panorama, it works, lets you customize a lot, and it is free.
The best photo stitcher for Linux I know is Autopano Giga and it is excellent. It was discontinued by GoPro after they took over the great French company that was Kolor. It is still out there on the internet and the only other competent photo stitcher I know of is PTGui.
I am a photoshop user and Adobe are trying to negate my licence for Photoshop CS 6. I've been very interested in trying something else. The problem is that I know PS inside and out and can get work done very quickly. Using anything else is a very tedious session of googling how to do very basic stuff that you could do in 30 seconds in PS because you know how it works. After googling how to scale an image that I pasted as a layer into another image for 20 minutes and getting tedious not-on-point answers I fired up photoshop again. Sigh.
It may be an unpopular stance, and not what you want to hear, but if you are that heavily invested in photoshop and it is a business tool for you, probably your best and only viable option is to pony up the money to Adobe.
Which is just the way Adobe like it. The writing was on the wall about this when they first introduced their subscription licenses!
High end creative software, you say?
Let me introduce you to the basic software the Ministry of Health in my country is forcing doctors to use. Windows only. Full stop. Oh, there are some companies providing approved alternative software. Guess what the best alternative is using: Chrom* plus a Chrom* extension. Does it run on Linux? After all, it's a client-server configuration, running on Chrom*, right? Fuck, no, it also uses a special program for e-signing, which, of course, it's only available for Windows.
Now, applying a digital signature on a PDF in Linux using an USB crypto token... Let's not go that way, OK?
I guess I could install Linux, spin up a Windows VM dedicated to that only program, but why should I bother?
Why should someone waste time with unsupported hacks when there is a simple solution that "just works"? Unless your reason is exactly to look for a hack taht works, but many people are not interested in it - for them computer and software are just tools to perform a task as soon as possible and wiht less hassle, not their task itself.
This is possible, but for work software, it just has to work.
I can get by with my own projects by using other software - Blender or Nomad for sculpting - Krita for basic photo editing - but when doing professional work, clients want stuff in certain formats and you can't be sitting there with a deadline farting around with which version of Proton to use.
I'll quite happily do that for my stuff, but clients are not so understanding.
There comes a point (very very fast) where, if you're trying to use something like that for official business reasons, you have to just give up and do it the way the software "developer" wants/expects it done. Because sure you might be able to get it working for now on unsupported hardware and OS, but sooner rather than later the developer will change something expecting all clients to be running Windows and break your setup. Adn then you can't get done whatever needs to be getting done. Can you afford that? Can you afford to keep clients/patients waiting for you to sort this crap out? If not, save yourself the hassle and run on the expected hardware and OS.
I too am a creative and lot of my software won't run on linux without hax, and it really just has to 'just work'.
Saying that, I have a workstation for graphics stuff and I have a laptops with a graphics card that I use for general netting and some minor gaming. The laptop is going to be Ubuntued very shortly after putting up with the large level of hoovery wich is Windows 11.
Also, the state of the America at the moment might give some pause to have everything that you do reported back to Redmond. At the moment it's for advertising purposes. Nothing says that won't change in the next few years (read as: days!).
A proper Linfluencer would have knowledge of, and present the advantages of, each distro. Doing that would allow said Linfluencer to create a series of podcasts, and engage their audience (excuse me, "followers") over some period of time, fitting in well with they average attention span of said followers.
The problem is that a lot of "kids these days" aren't even using desktop PCs anymore. Their world is centered around phones and tablets. PCs are those old things old people who don't understand the current world anymore use to do boring old people stuff. Their choice of OS is Android or iOS
Edit: Yes, for a small sub set, PCs are for gaming. And only gaming. And most games run best on Windows. So that's what they want/use and we're back to the chicken and egg of "most games are only supported on windows because that's what most gamers use, and most gamers use windows because that's what all the games they want to play needs"
I noticed on Amazon the other day, lots of refurbished Windows 10 desktop computers from around £60 upwards. Possibly even cheaper at local 2nd hand tech shops.
I've used Mint Cinnamon for over a decade (since Windows 8.1 came out) and no way will I ever go back to using a Windows computer, despite earning my livelihood (now retired) writing business software for DOS then Windows computers. I'm happy to be rid of the bloated mess that Windows has become.
I've used Mint Cinnamon for over a decade
Let me put in a plug for Mint with the Mate desktop; Mate is, essentially, GNOME 2 as the GNOME project went off the rails with GNOME 3.
Mint is what I run on my laptop, at home my desktop runs Debian with the Mate desktop. Mint gets much of its packages from Debian - not that an end user needs to worry about that.
Mint Mate here, too...mate!
Seriously, though, switching from Windows to Linux is literally as easy as picking up an off-lease refurb machine off Goodwill, downloading a Linux install image from the web, burning it to a USB stick and booting it up. Which I did a few weeks ago. If you're even moderately techy, it's an hour's work. The refurb machines are under a hundred dollars here in the US, but there will soon be a glut of "Win10 but not Win11" machines (thanks, Microsoft!). If you don't want (or have room for) a second machine, buy a new disk drive (I recommend SSD, but HDD are cheaper), swap it for your Windows drive, and install Linux on that. $50 ventured, nothing lost, since you can always swap the Windows drive back in and pick up where you left off.
If you're not technically inclined, ask your teenage daughter (or son) for help. They do this stuff all the time. Check with your local Scout troop...they always have a nerd in the bunch.
Take it from a long time Linux and Windows user -- Linux doesn't suck any worse than Windows, and it's getting better. Definitely worth a weekend test drive.
< "If you're not technically inclined, ask your teenage daughter (or son) for help. They do this stuff all the time."
I'm sure some do, but I do tech support and sysadmin stuff in an educational setting, and the average kid doesn't know an SSD from an STD. They know how to click a link and how to find the app store, but the technical knowledge ends there. The second they see an error message (even if it's one of the helpful ones), it's game over. "It's broken..."
I recently installed native Linux onto my work laptop, out of frustration of how Windows has gradually grown ever more confusing and bloated environment. My actual daily work and toolchains are on top of Linux anyway, yet the default offering of the fine IT department's is to provide Windows laptops so that users can run Linux in a virtual machine for that part of the work.
The IT department doesn't promote nor support Linux, yet they seem not to disallow (or fire) people from self-installing Linux into the corporate stinkpads either, so a handful of rogues have gone that path.
Haven't regretted a minute for leaving the Windows layer out from the stack, everything is just so much cleaner and work faster that way, instead of the earlier linux-on-VM-on-Windows. The Microsoft office, teams & outlook tools nowadays work okayish (not perfect, but okay) in web browsers also, so us native linux users can still use the fine Microsoft suite whenever that is necessary.
> but Linux is forever
Linux basically wins by default these days but I certainly can't say it is forever in that it is constantly changing. I would even say that GNU, Linux, etc is an umbrella term for a group of operating systems that continuously die and get replaced every few years by a loosely similar project with the same name.
> die and get replaced every few years by a loosely similar project with the same name.
Sorry, which OS were you referring to again?
(Glances over at the boring old LX* desktop on Debian/Debian/whatever and compares it to the mess of configs and third-party tools needed to keep the Windows VMs looking consistent)
Apparenfly, according to Distrowatch -
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews
- Facebook now deems Linux to be malware, which is ironic, since Meta itself uses Linux.
Malware
n.
Malicious computer software that interferes with normal computer functions or SENDS PERSONAL DATA ABOUT THE USER TO UNAUTHORIZED PARTIES OVER THE INTERNET.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Malware
As this article suggests, it's doubly ironic since Microsoft harvests your data.
Distrowatch is spreading partial misinformation here. Available evidence shows that Facebook has been blocking (not consistently, but it's definitely happened) links to the Distrowatch site, but not to Linux content in general. My guess is that the supposed malware is a Chinese distro on the distrowatch list, but this is purely speculation on my part.
This is a misleading statement.
If you run Mint or any other Linux distro that does not have a rolling release update model, you will still have to sometimes perform significant maintenance to move to new versions. As far as I remember (and I'm mostly using Ubuntu with a smattering of Devuan and Slack), you still need to do a dist-upgrade once every four or five years as browers often end up refusing to run on what are deemed "out of support" versions of most of the distros.
The situation is not that dissimilar to Windows. It is not "Windowstm" that is going out of support, it is "Windows 10". The current version of Mint will eventually go out of support just the same.
For this 10->11 upgrade, Microsoft have put some additional requirements on a system to allow it to get to 11, but it won't be that long before Mint and most other distros won't support 32 bit x86 systems, so there are again similarities. (OK, I admit that you're probably looking at systems over 20 years old to find 32 bit x86 systems, but I'm sure there are people still out there using them, and possibly even some still sold, but probably for niche environments).
I'm fully supportive of people moving to Linux (and have done foe members of my family - my wife doesn't even realise she's running Linux on her laptop), not just to extend the life of their systems, but also because I think it's a much less exploitative ecosystems, but is it a one time move that becomes forever?
No.
This is why I recommend Solus as it has a "curated rolling" model (weekly updates, no need to do anything other than check for updates forever, with very little risk of problems). They did have a "bus factor" issue a couple of years ago but that has been resolved. There are a few other distros with a similar model, Opensuse Tumbleweed and some of the Arch-based distros like Endeavour come to mind.
Mint used to need some typed commands to upgrade between major versions, but when I went from 21.3 to 22.0 last year it was done with a button-press (and then clicking OK on several warnings about what it was about to do), followed by a "Please reboot your system" message. Point versions (I went from 22.0 to 22.1 a few weeks ago) have always been with a button press (since 17 at least). This was all from the usual updating tool (I've forgotten the name). I guess that "dist-upgrade" is one of the commands run in the background by the GUI?
Personally, I would never trust a GUI to handle system upgrades. Even if I was on Windows, I would much prefer to see Windows print a log of wtf it is going to do, what it is doing, with the option to stop it. But no, all you get from Microsoft is "Hang Tight! We're getting everything ready for you!"
Having just done the 21.3 to 22 upgrade on both my laptop and desktop I can confirm there is a 'Testing the update to check for issues' step along with various points you can choose to bail out. I had an issue with 'foreign applications' (apps installed directly by me and not through the Software Manager) which needed attention before the upgrade could complete but all the needed information was on the Mint Forums
Went from 21.3 to 22 yesterday. Discovered how useful timeshift can be. The problem was orphan packages (I had some PPA packages and some bleeding edge stuff). Once they were removed, the upgrade ran to completion..it took a few hours and it's probably better not to read the messages that scroll by. Almost everything worked perfectly, though I did need to reinstall WINE, KiCAD and LibreOffice. I know two of those were PPA packages, not sure why Office didn't go right, but a reinstall brought everything back just fine.
Yeah, I can't complain. Going to wait a few days for my heart rate to go down, take another timeshift, then do the 22 to 22.1 upgrade.
Nope, you MUST be running the latest everything or your apps won't run. Oh, that library was removed because it's the old version and not secure, and it won't be made secure because it's been deprecated for version 3. So, you must update all your apps but there's a conflict.
Sound familiar?
Linux is forever...in need of command line hacking to keep it running.
Nope. Have not seen that for quite a few years with Mint MATE. Yesterday's auto-upgrade from 21.3 to 22 I would rate as a 90% success, 5% learning project and 5% WTF didn't it do that right?
Compared with Windows popping up useless "hints" and invitations to try something I don't care about when I'm trying to work? Unwanted and unrequested updates that remove apps I use, break stuff, or change OS behavior? No contest.
Mint? No updates? What ARE you on about?
I've put MANY updates from Mint on one of my machines and the hardest one was the jump from 19 to 20. The rest since have all been easy-breezy. All, checks notes, 10 of them since version 19.
I love the comments form people who have obviously not touched Linux in years. You have no idea how obvious you are.
Was this comment targetted at me?
Me, who is replying on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system, and who was using a RHEL Enterprise 8.9 system as my daily driver for my work earlier today, and who was logged into a Slackware system to test something out earlier as well.
Elsewhere in my environment, I have Devuan running running on another system, which has been upgraded from Beowolf through Chimaera to Daedalus.
I have so many Linux systems running around here, and almost no Microsoft systems anywhere in my fleet of systems (I have one Windows VM, and my laptop can dual boot into Windows 7, but hasn't for about 6 months).
I have taken my personal daily driver (mine, not work's) running Ubuntu from 6.06 through every LTS release up to 22.04 (it's moved through several physical systems with disk moves and clones, so I regard it as the same system). It's not been plain sailing with every update, some have been better than others.
Dist-upgrade is the standard Debian tool for upgrading from one release to another. I have not done similar upgrades for Mint, but I am no novice upgrading Linux.
I am not a professional Linux system administrator. I am, however, a professional AIX and UNIX administrator and troubleshooter, and have been for 40 plus years.
So I don't think your comment describes me at all!
Updating Linux Mint 22.0 to 22.1 took about 4 minutes on my PC with probably 5 clicks of the mouse. It did request a reboot which most updates do not. Compared to Windows, it is a walk in the park. If that is the price every 4 years, bring it on. Better than Windows that probably will need another new machine, yet again for Windows 12; lets not even think of Windows 13. So is Linux for ever? Yes, in my book, as I have purged ALL Microsoft software, never to "infect" my machines again.
I installed Mint Cinnamon on an Acer Aspire 5552 (AMD Athlon II X2 processor P320) with 3GB of memory (ex-Windows 7 laptop) and found it really struggled and ended up installing Mint Xfce which worked far better. That is probably my lack of Linux use as I've not really used it much since I used Redhat and Mootif back in the late '90's.
3GB of RAM sounds on the light side. I always put 8 and 16 if the machine will take it. The cost is low, so I do it as a matter of habit. Another thing that will boost Linux performance is to run a SSD on a machine that came with a HDD. I have never had a Linux install that performed worse than the Windows install on the same machine.
3GB is a bit on the light side, but OP's issue with Cinnamon was likely their CPU. I had a similar issue trying to use Cinnamon on a system with an ancient 2 core processor. It had 4GB of ram, which really is enough for an OK (not great, but usable) experience on Cinnamon. It was having only 2 process threads that brought Cinnamon to a crawl. LXQt was a much better experience on the same system.
Nice article. Making the move to Linux Mint myself. Nevertheless there are some things to keep in mind:
1. Antivirus does exist for Linux, see for example ESET. Given all the threats out there, I do recommend getting anti-virus
2. If you use Office 365 in the cloud, you do not get all of the functionality available in the desktop versions. For example, no macros or ActiveX controls in the web version of MS Word. See for details for example https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/word-features-comparison-web-vs-desktop-3e863ce3-e82c-4211-8f97-5b33c36c55f8
3. Using Office 365 in the cloud means that Micro$oft still has access to much of your private data.
4. For many Steam games you need to install Proton, a fork of Wine. With Proton many games run without a hitch.
All in all, I think Linux Mint will fulfill the needs of many users. Another reason to move to Linux for me is that Windows 11 does not suport VR anymore. In Linux support is not complete yet, but at least offers more perspective through projects like Monado.
Just because a game "doesn't support Linux" doesn't mean you're out of luck. Check them on ProtonDB.
These days, it's a rare occasion when I find a game that doesn't work out of the box on steam. Just "apt install steam", go to options and "Enable SteamPlay for all titles" and try your favourite Windows game.
...Oh.
That's a bit more than "we don't support Linux", that's more like "We unfairly discriminate against all Linux users because we think they are all cheats and hackers"
Any examples of games that are doing this? Their publishers need a talking-to.
But yes, in your earlier post, I agree it is time to ditch them, and tell your friends why
Indeed something *does* need to be set straight...
"4. For many Steam games you need to install Proton, a fork of Wine. With Proton many games run without a hitch."
I've never had to manage/install wine or proton to let windows-native games run. The Steam client handles it automatically when you select to enable compatability for an individual game, or for all games.
TBH, anti-virus is a losing battle, and comes with many drawbacks, i.e. most AVs are basically rootkits in of themselves. ClamAV is somewhat useful for scanning suspicious files, but in the days of infinitely permutable obfuscated code thanks in part to AI, as well as supply-chain attacks, you'd be a fool to rely on AV.
Run anything potentially-dodgy in a VM, monitor the network traffic and disk contents of the VM from outside. That's about the best you can do.
Depends which ESET product you are looking at. Her is a release anouncement of last September for ESET Endpoint Antivirus for Linux 11.1.3.0. That page contains an end-of-life warning, but that only affects previous versions of the software.
That's the bit that jarred with me a bit: "just use the O365 webapps". I've got licenced copies of desktop Office, and I tend to use them a lot, and would rather not have to pay to rent a licence in perpetuity. I've only recently treated myself to a new version, having been resolutely stuck on 2013 with no issues (granted it was outside of support, but realistically it was low risk). Similarly, I still have need to use Teams, and the web version is clunky at best (I've looked at various Linux installations before and found them hit/miss). I've never managed to gel with Libre or similar either, and would have even less chance of convincing my wife.
Haven't looked at wine for a while though, so may explore that, as I'm one of the Win10 luddites, refusing to move to 11 (disabled the TPM2 in the BIOS to ensure it won't sneak on)
The web versions of MS Office are shit!
The click-to-run installer (Office 2016 had the option of that and the older MSI; every version since, including the subscription one, is CTR only) doesn't seem an option under Wine - I've looked at quite a few forums, and tested it several times myself (on Ubuntu) with no success - it won't install.
If you need MS Office for anything beyond basic functions, you really need to run it on Windows (or possibly MacOS). In the case of Windows, that might mean in a VM, of course.
Yep, I hate browser versions of anything really (not least because you start losing control of apps and switching, mainly because the OS generally 'sees' the browser as a single app). VM's become problematic for similar reasons (and is tricky to teach users how to navigate).
The "just use Linux, but jump through these very simple hoops" grates with me as much as Steve Jobs and his "you're holding it wrong"
Yep -- the article essentially takes contradictory positions. Steven doesn't trust Microsoft, and doesn't realize you can turn off Recall (which was removed and will be defeatable) or most telemetry. If you're the kind of person who cares enough to even think about Linux, you know that you need to check your Windows settings for things like that. And then he turns around and says you can run your Office apps on the web in Microsoft's cloud, which means that *your* personal or business information, which in many cases may be subject to nondisclosure (much of my work certainly is), gets transferred into Microsoft's grubby hands. As if you should trust them with *that*. Uh, no. Remember, for most consumer cloud applications, you're the product, not the customer.
Linux is a religion as much as an OS. The Register's readers are largely members of that religion so sure, it's fun to bash MS here and feel superior because you use <the one true distro> instead. But for many people, especially who have to exchange Office documents with others for work, Windows is still needed. And if you're worried about safety after MS stops pushing updates Windows 10 is much better than 11 so it's worth sticking with it whenever you can), there's always 0patch.
My Win10 machine keeps annoying me with prompts to upgrade to Win11 to which I continually decline - where is the "Never As Again" option?
In preparation for migrating said Win10 machine to Linux I have been testing a few Linux Flavours on a much older machine... (Most of the servers I manage remotely use Ubuntu but it doesn't seem to have the features I want in a Desktop!)
Based on various commentary here, and elsewhere, I gave Mint a try...
The install went cleanly, as did the installation of various other software packages I need...
I used the system for a few hours and was suitably impressed.
Turned the system off and waited about a month to see how upgrades worked...
Did the upgrade and it failed to boot afterwards :(
My research didn't give any clues as to why the upgrade failed to I thought it was something I had done...
Repeated process and on next upgrade the same sort of fail...
Now I am investigating Rocky (based on a previous articles here and other readings)
Keeping my fingers crossed...
I have had that happen, occasionally. It's usually display driver issues. You don't happen to be running an Nvidia display processor, do you?
When a Linux machine fails to boot after an upgrade, it's always possible to interrupt the boot sequence and revert to the pre-upgrade kernel.
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/linux-mint-20-show-grub-boot-menu-linux-mint-startup
Normally, if a display card falls out of Nvidia's support blob which is installed by the proprietary drivers, the system boots, but fails to start the desktop, leaving you in a text console session with a login: prompt at worst, or in an unaccelerated 1024x768 VISA low colour frame buffer at best.
The problem used to be that the driver that is provided as part of the package as a binary, pre-compiled object in the proprietary drivers tend to drop the code for older Nvidia chipsets as Nvidia decide they are too old to support, so suddenly, after an update, you end up getting a degraded or non-existent graphics console. This is normally documented, but is not obvious, as it will be in the README or notes for the update, which you probably won't read before installing the update. But the system should still run, if not very usefully.
The best way of preventing this, at the risk of possibly downgrading the graphics performance, is to install the open source drivers (is it still called Nouveau?), although it does look like Nvidia may be changing their behaviour a little.
From what other people say, Mint seems to be pretty good at upgrading itself, so I wonder whether the system was powered off part way through the update, or whether the system was dual booted with Windows, and Windows did something bad to the MBR, Grub, or even UEFI, if the system has that.
>at the risk of possibly downgrading the graphics performance
For very old nvidia GPUs that are not supported anymore by the proprietary nvidia driver, nouveau has better performance than the proprietary driver ever had.
For all GPUs, reclocking is still in development, meaning performance is hit or miss, although Church of Emacs displaying always works fine.
>is to install the open source drivers (is it still called Nouveau?),
Nouveau is a free software driver with free VBIOS init and free peripheral software, with very good GPU support, so Mint should default to Nouveau, but they just had to be extra-proprietary.
"where is the "Never As Again" option?"
It's a common trait of much software now, not just Microsoft.
Do you want to 'install this / configure this now' or 'ask me later', 'mabye later', 'remind me later', 'remind me tomorrow / this afternoon / in five minutes'. There is rarely a 'fuck off and don't ask again' option!
We use onedrive to keep phone pictures backed up (into cloud, onto remote NAS and on each laptop onedrive is configured to download all files locally). there is onedrive for linux and I have seen an app that allows the continuous replication - bit of a faff, but doable. Or I consider OwnCloud again after a good few years since I last looked,
SkySports on 2 laptops is the pain. No Linux client at all. Until I can find a way around that I am kind of stuck, but moving to a *nix is something that I am really really considering
Perhaps try Syncthing to a local NAS to avoid the need for a cloud. There is an open-source phone app for it too, which is handy for accessing phone pictures on the PC.
As for Sky Sports, I assume they don't have a web client then?
Probably you could (see icon) find an alternative distributor, and as long as you are still paying Sky for the subscription, I'd be surprised if they could make a case against you for simply watching what you have paid to watch.
I've said this before elsewhere, but I've personally been recommending Zorin as a replacement for Win 10 to my non-techy friends and relatives, because it has a similar learning curve to Mint for ex-Windows users, excellent support, and they've made Windows compatibility an absolute mission, to the point where most Windows apps can get up and running on a vanilla install just by launching the .exe file, just like on Windows. I've also been recommending the StarLabs range of Linux-first devices since getting a StarBook myself a few years ago - they're UK-based business with excellent tech-support. Lastly... While I get the point about Linux not falling victim to Windows viruses, they still run the risk of being asymptomatic carriers. I'd always recommend running clamAV and running regular scheduled scans, if only because it boosts the 'herd immunity', to somewhat torture the analogy.
The key to all of this has always been minimising the faff, making things at least appear consistent, and boosting the support for people who use Windows and expect every computer to work that way. Hell... I know what I'm doing in a terminal and how to use a package manager, write shell scripts, etc. and even I prefer a nice GUI to make things quick, easy and convenient from time to time. There's times where power and precision are required, and times where I just want to click a few icons and get on with other, more important stuff! For most people, the latter is all they care about in a PC.
Well, quite. But unfortunately it isn't one size fits all, and what works for some doesn't for others. And an article/opinion from someone that's used *nix for so long isn't aware/ignorant of the likes of ClamAV, ESET etc?
Anything is possible with enough effort, but the moment something takes more effort than it should, the thoughts about "simply using X program to make Y windows program/game work" instantly makes comments about 70 year old nan's using it pointless.
With plenty of work it can be made effortless for anyone - for the laypeople who just browse and consume media, absolutely it's fine. For those who need specific tasks doing in a specific way, it probably isn't.
So for now, my main desktop remains Windows (11 "lite") for the high end games etc I just cba to faff with 3rd party software for, and my secondary dev/media machine stays nix. (Mint, oddly enough).
"makes comments about 70 year old nan's using it pointless"
I can't supply a 70 year old nan as counter evidence but a CiL in her 90s has been using Zorin for some years now. Unfortunately neither of her own children have produced offspring so she's not "nan". What's more, her children in their 50s are also able to use it. SWMBO is a grandmother but I'm not allowed to divulge her age; like me she uses Devuan or, as she's apt to express it, Google or SeaMonkey.
It should be noted that even after switching to Linux one need not be without Windows. You can get a legit Windows 11 license for 10 Euro or less these days which will run quite neatly in a VirtualBox virtual machine. Yes, there is a performance penalty, but stripping it to the bone and then removing its network access does wonders for both lightness and performance. And viftualization automatically sandboxes all of WIndows; the host OS sees it as an application which, when it misbehaves, can simply be terminated. Or, if you have enough memory but don't want to waste CPU cycles on it while they're not being used productively, simply paused.
I've been running Linux as my main OS since I got my grubby hands on a Slackware 0.18 CD back in 1994, but there are WIndows apps that I simply need and for which no proper Linux equivalent exists. Photoshop is the main one of these (GIMP simply doesn't cut it) and to back up my wife's metric ton of copy-protected CDs and DVDs (so we can play their content on an RPi with Kodi) the only software that can deal with that nonsense is WIndows-only as well. Then there's hardware config utilities, specific applications that the people who pay for my meal ticket require me to run, and so on.
It's that sort of thing that holds many people back from ditching the horrors of Redmond in favour of a paenguin-based environment. So it really should be pointed out that they needn't worry and that they can have their cake and eat it, too, by running WIndows as a fallback option in a VM.
That's my solution -- VirtualBox with a Windows install. I have an XP one for a negative scanner that requires software that's XP vintage, and another Win10 VM with a Ghost Spectre install (strips out the junkware parts of Windows) and an Office install. Since I live in Massachusetts, it's massgravelled. And, of course, for stuff that won't run in a VM, I have a completely legit licensed Win10 laptop, which lives in a drawer until I need it, which is very seldom.
Linux does require a willingness to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations (like the gentleman above who got a blank screen after upgrading Mint) but Googling (always good to have another machine available) usually turns up someone who has had the *exact same* problem and has managed to solve it. Of course, if you're the first, and manage to fix the issue, it's only polite to post what you did on one of the forums. But, I have to say, Mint MATE has been exceptionally robust and trouble free (there, I've jinxed myself!) over the years I have been running it.
I'm currently bringing up a HP ZBook 15U G5 with the latest Mint. It's having issues with its built in Intel I219-V Ethernet controller, which I find unusual (I have the same controller in my desktop, which is trouble-free). Some Googling has led me to believe that it may be an issue with the particular firmware on that controller, but the simplest fix seems to be a $9 USBC Ethernet dongle! I'm not going to leave it alone, my instinct is to chase down the problem and solve it, but for now, the dongle wins.
(and for those who think Linux is for youngsters, I'm turning 71 next month, and remember downloading floppy images from tsx-11.mit.edu to install Linux in 1993)
“Linux does require a willingness to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations (like the gentleman above who got a blank screen after upgrading Mint) but Googling (always good to have another machine available) usually turns up someone who has had the *exact same* problem and has managed to solve it.”
My experience of delving into Linux troubleshooting is different. Plenty of users have had the exact same problem but there are 10x the number of solutions to be found, each seemingly entirely unrelated to the next. Command line, of course. Five minutes to look up the meaning of the command parameters of a particular solution. Fifty minutes to *begin* rabbit-holing trying to understand the parameters.
Blindly running lengthy commands from the Internet, not my favoured option, will typically fail more often than it works. So, for whatever reason, understanding both the problem and the solution eludes me far more with Linux than with Windows.
I’d much rather run Linux but so far there has always been some unsolvable problem, a dealbreaker. Talking to a specific piece of external hardware for example, or running a specific game. And once again I end up back with Windows.
I’m on Win11 now, I will try Linux again when support ends. But there is a limited amount of time that I am willing to spend trying to break free from MS. Choosing my battles…
I've gotten people in their 70s who wouldn't know a shell command from Excel up and running on Mint without any trouble.
People now in their 70s and 80s literally invented computers and computing. An inabilty to use computers or even install Linux has nothing to do with age.
Imagine if you had written " I've gotten black people who wouldn't know a shell command from Excel up and running on Mint without any trouble."
Trouble is for older people you really need to make the change “early” so that it becomes part of your long-term/muscle memory.
I have seen too many old people become elderly, with all the associated memory problems, and with the constant changes MS and websites makes, loose their train of thought and get lost in the interface and give up.
Not really.
SOME people now in their 70s and 80s literally invented computers and computing.
Also, people forget things and technology moves on.
Both my parents are in their 80s. My father is a retired chemistry and physics teacher. He used to bring computers home over the holiday period, and so my first introduction to computing was using a RM380 Z, a TRS-80, a Video Genie and a BBC. He taught me to build my first PC, and is still a clever fellow.
However nowadays he's flummoxed by a lot of tech, can't really get the hang of a mobile phone and considers networking to be a black art.
And my mum, while having more success with her phone, can only use a PC if she's following a list of instructions (click here, press this button, chose this menu etc.)
So I'm unclear what your point is, especially why you think the previous comment is any way a generalisation of all elderly people. Unless you're specifically looking to create something to be offended at?
As someone who has done IT support for many years, I always find the assumption from some that IT abilities are related to age (and sometimes gender) rather perplexing. As anyone who has worked in IT support will know, there is no common denominator at all between IT abilities and age or gender - you may well find a 70-year-old woman who is really clued up, and a 25 year old bloke who lacks basic IT skills and understanding.
It's not even related to intelligence. I once had a (non-IT) colleague who would get unnecessarily defensive of his poor IT skills and tell us that he was a member of Mensa. But nobody was doubting that he was a very intelligent bloke - he simply wasn't very good with computers. Some people just aren't (just as some people wouldn't be any good at the things he was good at).
I do think there is a tendency to assume that younger people are IT savvy because they can use a smartphone and are familiar with whichever social media crap is currently in vogue. That really doesn't equate to IT skills, and in some cases they can be absolutely clueless when something stops working how they expect, or they encounter some slightly more complex software.
I think using LTS distros with a desktop you like is a good start.
I've been using Cinnamon on Fedora and Debian but decided to give Fedora Kinoite ( because cinnamon is not available as immutable yet) a try. I like the ostree stuff creating OS snapshots that are immutable (it is a bit slow making the image but worth while security wise). I'm still getting used to KDE again but it is way better than gnome 3 ( gnome the reason I could not stick with Endless OS).
I tried out BlendOS which uses containers where you can forward commands to different containers, that did support Cinnamon
I'm also avoiding Ubuntu's snaps but can just about stand flatpaks.
Mint is great, yes it has a few issues on proprietary hardware - looking at you HP, but nothing that cannot be either safely ignored or fixed if you want to. For instance, suspend on my machine doesn't work right, I'm not bothered. Other than a slight driver tweak on the graphics side to get a particular graphic working properly and some codecs, I've never really had to maintain it. Edge does exist for Linux, I have tried it (needed to test something). It's a case of just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It works about as well as the windows version, I promptly uninstalled it again afterwards.
All these comments explain why there's still general public resistance to Linux - quite apart from the fact that many people think "the computer" = "Windows" and have never heard the phrase "operating system", let alone can tell you what it is. Mint, Solus, Debian, "Ubuntu with a smattering of Devuan and Slack" and 1,000 more. And that's before you get onto "forking" to make things work.
How on earth are the general public supposed to know the difference and make an informed choice? Yes, I get it's all *nix, but most people aren't and don't want to be techies, just like most people who drive a car have no interest in and couldn't tell you about torque points or what "revs" actually means, or the relative effects of different PSIs. Windows, for better or worse, just switches on from the get go, you create an account and you never have to worry about anything else "technical" again, except occasionally to reboot for an update when it prompts you.
Also, I've used, or tried to use, Libre Office. I have a few hundred Word docs dating back a decade or more that include multiple small images, anything from half a page to 60-70 pages. Certain headings in bold text. All in the same font style and size. When I last replaced my computer (to Win11, boo hiss), Libre Office blew lots of the formatting out the water - at random. Some bold headings were now partly or non-bold, and some in a new font. Text that had been beside some images was now under them. Some text columns and small inserted tables weren't displaying correctly. And these are fairly basic features and functions so it should have been a seamless transition. I lived with it for a few months then bought Office again.
I hate all the prompts to use Office 365 (I just want a single install and I don't need to access anything from elsewhere except email), and backups to the cloud (I've got far too much data for that to be affordable so I'll stick with my various removable hard drives). But unless *nix can establish itself in the office (pardon the pun) environment so that people can become familiar with it, and until the 'every developer makes their own version' number of products can reduce to - at best - a few product names, nothing is going to change in the mass home market.
"How on earth are the general public supposed to know the difference and make an informed choice? Yes, I get it's all *nix, but most people aren't and don't want to be techies, just like most people who drive a car have no interest in and couldn't tell you about torque points or what "revs" actually means, or the relative effects of different PSIs."
And yet I observe that the general public are able to make informed choices about different makes and model of cars and do so. They are also capable of driving them.
Your provide a compelling argument for the general public being able to use Linux. Thank you.
Well, i'd say the difference is that cars are very well standardised. There's only really one user-interface choice to make when buying a car: Automatic or Manual. And that too, thanks to EVs, is slowly becoming irrelevant. OK, EV or not EV is an important choice too, but it's one three-way choice since there are no manual EVs.
But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed, nowhere will you find a car that uses an aeroplane-style throttle, or one so customisable that you have to buy the doors and wingmirrors separately.
I agree with the OP and our Reg columnist Liam Proven that there is poor standardisation in the Linux world, however I disagree that better standardisation would necessarily make Linux better. Linux is built by enthusiasts/tinkerers, for enthusiasts/tinkerers and that is IMO what makes it great. There will be drawbacks in that people new to the Linux world don't know who to follow and what tech to learn, but that is better than the alternative, which is to remove choice from those who want it.
Think again about cars. Do you want a sports car or one to carry a family with 5 children? A motorway cruiser, a city car or one to negotiate the half-mile farm track to your home? Is it the smallest car possible or one to carry 3 large dogs in the back? There are a load of options to make and they're all, actually part of the user interface. The user interface is more than the controls.
Now it's true that Windows only has two choices of UI: take it or take it. But those choices seem to change frequently, not just from 7 to 8 to 10 to 11 but in between as well as their marketing department decides to drop more stuff, be it advertising or various AI wheezes, on a monthly basis, again on a take it or take it basis.
You might be prepared to suck that up but for my own purposes I don't want to have to keep tinkering to get rid of unwanted stuff - if that's possible - from month to month or something completely different every few years. And while I might want - and get - a solid daily driver others might want the option to tinker. That's where choice comes in and it's a lot better to have it than not.
Think again about cars. Do you want a sports car or one to carry a family with 5 children? A motorway cruiser, a city car or one to negotiate the half-mile farm track to your home? Is it the smallest car possible or one to carry 3 large dogs in the back?
You seem to be asking whether I want a laptop or a desktop and whether I want it for web browsing, games or development. The user interface is another matter.
Well, i'd say the difference is that cars are very well standardised. [...]But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed, [...].
Unless, of course, you're buying a French car, in which case all manner of key controls are in non-"standard" locations or using non-"standard" means of controlling them.
I'm looking at you Peugeot!
Ah yes, I remember my old Renault, where the gearstick was mounted high up like a van, the handbrake was a pull-switch near the driver-side door, the dashboard was in the middle, and the radio controls were on a stick next to the wipers. All manner of things went wrong with it so I sent it to the scrap heap
"But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed..."
I was with you until you got to indicators & wipers, & would seek to remind the court that most if not all Japanese manufacturers had their column stalks reversed relative to European (& US?) practice until at least the turn of the century.
Just put a 2000 vintage Subaru Legacy out to grass on a mate's smallholding due to terminal rust. 6 months later I'm still randomly letting people know of my intentions with the wipers in every other vehicle I drive, though oddly I've never tried to clear the screen with the indicators.
The UI for any car is pretty simple : there's the steering wheel, blinkers, lights, gas pedal and brake. The rest is fluff.
Managing a computer, installing programs, managing disk data and folders, that is an entire other ball game.
I know a lot of people who can't manage sorting out their Inbox, for Pete's sake.
Yes, LibreOffice will sometimes mess the formatting on decades old docs. I still blame Office as it was the 'standard,' yet no one could use/see its code to write new apps to approximate Office close enough to avoid any problems. As LO has matured, it has gotten better at Office docs, but not completely.
Secondly, I've been able to open decades old Office docs with LO while Office 365 refuses. (e.g., with Word 6.0 docs I have.)
For old print material, I capture them with my phone's camera, and either open the text image in Gimagereader or use Google Keep to convert the text to digital. For the most part, you will lose formatting, but you have the new editable text.
Oh, distro-hopped from 2006-2008, and have used Mint since then!
> All these comments explain why there's still general public resistance to Linux...
"Resistance"? The "general public" at best might possibly, maybe have even heard of Linux. It's simply not on their radar. Hardly surprising, as their PC/laptop/work machine (if it's not Mac) arrived with Windows pre-installed, it's what they expect, what they are accustomed to, and they are quite likely unaware that there are actually alternatives. And even if they were aware, why would they want the faff of installing a new, unfamiliar OS? (It's not as if they actually had to install Windows themselves.)
> How on earth are the general public supposed to know the difference and make an informed choice?
They google "Best Linux for beginners". Then they install Mint.
> Windows, for better or worse, just switches on from the get go ...
Um, so does Linux - once it's installed, as Windows generally is on a new (or work) PC; see above.
> Also, I've used, or tried to use, Libre Office. I have a few hundred Word docs dating back a decade or more ...
Interesting. I've found MS Word itself frequently fails miserably to cope with documents produced by earlier versions of... MS Word. (Especially tables and images.) The same applies to the online version of MS Office 365, which I'm obliged to use occasionally at work. Apart from being buggy as hell, it barfs on many documents produced by the "proper" MS Office.
Quote: ' if you're really serious about games, why are you on a desktop anyway?'
Erm, because I'm serious about gaming!
More seriously, this is horses for courses, consoles are easier and cheaper, but are also more locked down, with more platform exclusives etc. (Which is a bad thing).
PC gaming is far more flexible, and I'd argue for many games, such as strategy games and FPS games, mouse and keyboard are king. Plus for those games that a controller is better (driving games, 3rd person games like Assassin's Creed etc), you can just plug one in anyway. Also many big strategy games are just not available on consoles, or when they are, they are cut down limited versions, due to lack of resources in the consoles..
Ultimately, one is not better (from a usage point of view) than the other, as it depends on your use case, what games you play, if you prefer K+M over a controller etc. So play on what you want, on what you want!
What I will say though, is I've been gaming on Mint Cinnamon for over two years now, and the only game that I had real issues with was MS Flight Sim (the 2023 version), which is of course from the MS XBox studio!
Yes, PC gaming share is actually going up because consoles look so pointless now. MS has nearly abandoned the XBox hardware platform, PS5 failed to make a compelling case why you needed one (there were some awesome exclusives, but not enough and half are now coming to PC), and Switch is off doing its own thing as usual. But you can actually emulate Switch games much better on the PC than you can play them on the Switch. For anyone who wants completely mindless casual convenient stuff, phones have that market covered now.
I would say, though, that everyone talking everywhere about 'oh games just work on Linux now' is being, uh, very kind. Certainly many games do! Especially if you manage to wedge SteamDeck onto a desktop (or wait for official desktop SteamDesk distro, soon), and a lot of stuff works with Proton. I continue to try. But there is still far too much dicking around and new games I want to play that just do not work (or do not work properly) under Linux, which is one reason I still have a Windows boot to go with my various Linux boots. I have one friend who doesn't really game, his entire game is just stubbornly trying to make games run on his various Linux setups.
It reminds me of when MacOS 8 was out, and we had these two Mac guys at work who would go on and on about how Macs were much better than Windows PCs because they never crashed, and several times a week I would see their Macs crash. But they just completely edited that out of their memories, it never happened. I don't think they were being malicious, it just could not happen so it did not happen. Meanwhile we were using NT 4.0, which did not crash, and Win 95, which... okay, crashed about as often as the Macs, but we would not completely censor those crashes from this universe's timeline.
Anyhow, gaming in Linux is still an inferior experience ('just don't play those games that don't work' does not solve the problem, because I want to play those games) - but if you're willing to restrict which games you play, very usable. And with how rapidly Win11 is enshittifying and how fast Linux gaming is advancing (thanks Valve) I'm hoping for the day when you we can say without caveats that you can just game on Linux. And then what reason to use Windows, ever? Oh right, Copilot and Recall! /troll
Care to provide a few examples of borked games?
I'd say that simply trying a different Proton version from the drop down is hardly 'dicking around', you could try that.
No need to wedge SteamDeck onto the desktop, just enable SteamPlay (aka Proton support built-in to Steam) and play as you would on Windows.
I have several "Windows-Only" VR games that work out of the box on Linux, e.g. The Forest, Dead Effect 2, The Thrill of the Fight
Anyway I'd argue that Gaming on Linux is a superior experience, due to the horrendous experience of having to run Windows at all
I've had to 'dick around' with a few titles to get them 100% on Linux. But not many. I think at most I've lost 90 minutes to googling, faffing, testing.
Which sounds a bit damning, but that's because I don't immediately ask myself "how much time have I spent getting Windows games to work well on WINDOWS!?" because of bugs / dependencies /drivers?
The show stoppers are usually kernel-level anti-cheat OR a crappy launcher to sign into some studios 'online account' before I can experience my offline title.
Something I did note that Apex Legends would 100% have worked for ages if they chose to use the Epic Anti Cheat already provided for Linux - they elected not to. Until the Steam Deck launched and, presto, it was perfectly workable on Linux a week later. I'm very grateful to that bit of hardware for giving companies a little shove to put that extra 1% effort in.
I think the Steam Deck launch (almost 3 years ago now!) was quite critical.
Games that previously needed some tweaks, don't anymore, plus most devs now aim for deck compatibility (including big studios and indies), which also automatically means desktop Linux compatibility.
2+ years ago, I was doing more tweaking (wine/proton tricks to install runtimes etc.), and had a few issues with games that used custom launchers (2K, Ubisoft etc).
The only thing I do now is...
1. Add 'gamemoderun %command%' to the launch options (completely optional, but can help game performance a little sometimes). Really wish Steam had the option to just set this globally!
2. I also install GE Proton, (simple unzip the .tar.gz to a dir under Steam (e.g. .steam/root/compatibilitytools.d) and restart Steam, GE proton is then selectable under Compatibility (globally or individually per game)).
If a game doesn't work with the default Proton from Valve, I set Compatibility to GE proton instead for that game, and it just works. Typically only needed for brand-new releases,
Note, I don't (apart from one *) play competitive games, so whilst I'm aware of some multiplayer anti-cheat systems having issues, this hasn't impacted myself.
* War Thunder is the only competitive game I play (occasionally), and it's Linux native, so no Proton needed.
I've used Linux in various flavours as my daily desktop since 2002, which almost qualifies me as a 'veteran'. I learned my Unix skills on SunOS 4.x during gap year work placements, and started playing with Linux in the late 90s. It was harder work back in 2002 (the same year we first got 0.5Mbps "broadband"), but still fun. Now, it's as easy as anything else, or easier, and prettier.
But all that incredible power and flexibility is right there, a click away. I could never go back now. Working in Windows feels like trying to do gymnastics in a straitjacket, although I will accept that if you really need the super advanced productivity stuff, MS Office is leagues ahead of LibreOffice. But 98% of people outside a corporate environment simply don't need that.
Re: MS Office being "leagues ahead"
In my previous job, we were running a huge project, multinational client stakeholders and multinational in-house contributors, with a multi-hundred page shared specification document that had to be approved and corrected many, many times. All using Microsoft Word and the document stored on Sharepoint. We had several hard deadlines, where multiple users were in the document.
It was a total nightmare. Different versions of Word, network lags, track changes switched on, all contributed to the problem. The solution was for one or two users to be in the document, while everyone else had to wait. Otherwise, things just ground to a halt. As it was, the section numbering, track changes and comments (yes, all turned on and being enthusiastically used by the client's people) made doing anything on the document impossible. There were just too many users and Word/Sharepoint didn't handle them well.
Maybe more extreme than our scenario, but I was doing similar with a fairly large 50-page report and a lot of changesets, working with collaborators both local and remote. It handled it better than I expected, but I'm not sure what would handle it better. Google Docs? Anyway, LibreOffice obviously cannot do anything like that, but for home users that's irrelevant.
"Anyway, LibreOffice obviously cannot do anything like that, but for home users that's irrelevant."
You would probably need the online version for that: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
I wonder, however, if what you describe, and even more so the OP, should take a look at how a lot of FOSS projects work - with a maintainer/editor responsible for the actual updates to the main document. Also whether flat file version of the relevant Open Documant Format would be better (it's a save option from LO) combined with something like git for version control.
There were several Collaboration Servers around in the late 1990s, unfortunately they didn’t do very well as they did not use MS Office, but their own office suite tuned to collaboration… Just shows how slow MS et al are innovating solutions customers really need…
From my observations over the years the average user really only uses email, a word processor and web a browser to any great extent.
The required feature sets in these applications are also pretty minimal. Anything more complex than Wordpad is usually a source of confusion as no document more complicated than a business letter is ever contemplated - so Libreoffice is not the greatest option here. Email clients in some ways worse - anything more complicated than Eudora only confuses. I have tried foisting Evolution and Thunderbird on to users but most prefer to use the web interface (yuck!) I have used Evolution ever since I couldn't get Alpine to do OAuth2 with Gmail and it's not too bad but a bit confusing in parts. I recall one chap seriously challenged in the upstairs department could constructively use PC-Pine when Eudora and Outlook (Express?) defeated him.Even browsers are becoming "feature encumbered."
Users and in fact everyone, are best prevented from using spreadsheets and presentation applications altogether.
Chromeboxes seemed to be a move in the right direction but the hardware, while inexpensive, was often underpowered and not of a particularly high quality and being another Chocolate Factory ecosystem didn't help. Oddy enough I have an HP Chromebook that now runs Mint quite nicely and previously Win10 would also run usuably - for whatever reason Chrome OS was always pretty clunky but a Win7 user found it quite usable.
"Anything more complex than Wordpad is usually a source of confusion as no document more complicated than a business letter is ever contemplated - so Libreoffice is not the greatest option here."
People may have wider needs than business letters (and I fail to see what you have against LO for that). I have a number of friends who write local history books.
I'm even working on one myself when not wasting too much time here. As I like to keep discussion of a map or photograph on the same double-page spread as the image it really needs proper word processing to do that as the text frequently needs to be expanded or précised to achieve that. I discarded the idea of using a eparate layout application very quickly. LibreOffice dies it nicely.
I appreciate that penguin wrangling is the more common activity here, but this reminds me of my 2021 piece
"The Impending Doom of Your Operating System Going to or Past 11, Versus the Lush Oasis of Open Source Systems" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/2021_wild_wild_world_of_windows.html (or with trackers in return for nicer formatting https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-impending-doom-of-your-operating.html
where the TL;DR is "Will the uncertainty over forced obsolescence of fairly recent hardware force Microsoft and Apple users to switch to open source alternatives?", with the conclusion being that it is at any rate a lot easier to communicate with open source developers (in this case OpenBSD ones) than reaching an actual person with the code within reach in the corporate world.
"That's because Mint, with its default Cinnamon interface, looks a lot like Windows 7's Aero frontend."
Heck, I've been running MInt Mate for years fronting an NT4/NT5 look-alike desktop. Perhaps Mint's LibreOffice's diagramming capability is less versatile than I recall with Microsoft's Vizio, but LibreOffice otherwise serves my needs. Windows programs can, for the most part, be run locally under CrossOver Linux.
More importantly, from the Window's immigrant point of view, software updates can take place without rebooting, except for the Linux kernel itself. Even upgrading the Mint version is at least straightforward.
A bit shallow arguments I think.
To compare, I'm an advanced beginner in linux - use it to ssh into the VM's in my basement - but I shy away from building a custom kernel, doing dkms, I only recently found out what ABI is and couldn't explain to you what POSIX is, even to save my life. At 58, even though I'm an IT pro, I decided to focus on the things I want to get done from now on instead of wasting time on things I'm supposed to know to hang out with the crowd. So it's debian stable for me, desktop and server. I install it with my eyes closed, even with wifi on earlier versions. I actually like netplan.io . I don't script in bash, but lua or pwsh.
Unfortunately by day it's Windows, for 6 six years still at least.
Recently my dad died and that came with a lot of work : communicating with siblings, collecting digital assets, compiling lists of attendants, forwarding contacts etc. All the while deadlines with banks, undertaker, hospital, authorities whooshed overhead. I went in "Let's do this" and I managed to do it all without defecting, but have to admit sometimes begrudgingly. Copy pasting email addresses from one app into another didn't work. Copy pasting screenshots. Calc looks like excel, but really isn't. You'd think these are basic things but I read up and those things are actually the hard part of dev's having to deal with differents DE's, platforms whatnot. I have respect, am not whining here. But your vaseline arguments aren't really helping to get a novice to stay on board.
Don't offer the blue pill.
It's the red pill they have to want.
I was planning to move my dad back to Linux since his computer sports a somewhat ancient AMD FX-8320 that still fully suits his needs but for some reason the HPLIP's drivers of our HP printer do not support duplex printing.
It reminded me of when I moved my dad from Linux back to Windows a lot of years ago when someone at CUPS decided to merge two libraries together thus breaking the drivers' dependencies of our previous Canon printer that we purposefully bought because of its official Linux support.
It's always those damn printers.
I'm starting to be tired of the relentless push towards FOSS by The Register. Anyway, most people run applications and have to use specific hardware devices - and still Linux dektop can't run many of them, especially the higher ones. I wil be forced to move to Windows 11 or macOS, because:
- I have a large number of photos processed with Adobe Lightroom. And there aren't really comparable Linux applications (Darktable is not). Anyway moving to any other application implies to re-process them.
- I use Helicon Focus and Helicon Remote for focus stacking. It doesn't run on Linux
- I have Canon professional photo printers to print them. Again, no drivers for Linux. CUPS maintainer even mocked recently those having to use such printer features, because the new major relaese will be even more limited. Good luck getting more users - printing "office" documents is dwindling, printers will be more and more specific devices.
- I have a Logitech Creative Console to use with Lightroom - again, it doesn't work with Linux
- I have a monitor with hardware calibration - again the utility to calibrate it works only on Windows and macOS.
And no, I can't run Windows in a VM because then color calibration would become a major issue, with two OS displaying images at the same time. And if any time I boot the OS I need to boot a VM also, I prefer to boot directly a single OS.
So sure, if all you need is a web browser, a text editor, a a WP/spreadsheet and do not need Office compatibilty, you can run whatever OS you like, Linux included.
Anyway is true Nadella is doing his best to kill Windows - I believe he wants to cut on development costs, increase data gathering, and push users to Azure. He will discover that without an OS and especialli its applications, Microsoft is just a cloud provider like the others, especially if everythign is run on Linux. But for a while he's safe because Linux is still a bad choice for desktop commercial software - and no, not everything will become open source one day, it's not a viable business model - it needs money to come from some other source, and we see which are the sources today.
No argument from here on the very real issues preventing people from migrating fully to Linux. I mentioned some of my own in a comment above.
The one problem you raised that might be solvable is the monitor calibration problem. I don't know which calibration device you use for your monitor, but I have an older Spyder Pro 4. I used it recently with the free DisplayCal to calibrate my Linux Mint laptop display with great results.
Another "trick" I discovered is that you can copy the *.icc calibration from your Windows PC and import it in Linux. I upgraded the display on my primary Windows 11 PC, and moved the old one over to a Linux box I have in my office. I was feeling lazy, so I found the Spyder calibration file and copied it to my Linux machine. Instant calibration!
The problem is the monitor vendor calibration utility - the monitor is hardware calibrated, the calibration data is loaded into the monitor hardware - runs only on macOS and Windows. I could calibrate the monitor without using its internal capability, but why should I? I bought it exactly because it has a more sophisticated control of display - for example it can also calibrate brightness of different areas of the monitor - the calibration utiliy draws a grid on the monitor and then each cell is calibrated separately.
The ICC profile are in a standard format which is OS independent, but the data they contain depend on both the monitor and the graphic card (for printers is even worse, it depends on the printer, inks and paper) - it might depend even on the GPU driver -too you can't just copy a profile from one machine to another, you'll need to perform a new calibration when something changes. And you need to perform calibration at regular intervals, since hardware "ages", especially monitors.
The fragmentation of Linux distro and the lack of binary compatibility means you can't write an application or driver and deploy on any distro. But that's something Linux refuses to address that, on pure ideological reasons. And probably even some from big web companies that wants people on their web applications so they can get data, not running their own appliations locally where it would be more difficult to get them (unless you're Nadella or Cook, and control the whole stack, of course).
Read the CUPS discussion about the new major release and dropping featurs. "Proprietary drivers are evil", "users don't need the printer advanced features", "printers advanced features are garbage", "IPP is good for everybody" (and close the thread as soon as they are shown wrong) - the worst of the FOSS mindset. But you're not a customer, so you can't complain. At the same time they ensure Linux printing can't compete with macOS...
Believe me, I really hate Nadella's Microsoft, he's worse than Ballmer. It crippled Windows (and Office - see new Outlook) to cut development costs and investments (enshittification at its best). but Linux still fails to be a real replacement. The only real replacement is macOS - but then you're hostage to Apple for the hardware too (with better support for third parties, though).
Thereby saying "Still using Windows 10? Switch to Linux!!" blidnly, without assessing users needs is not clever. It becomes just ideology.
I wouldn't care using Linux, I don't care much about the OS itself - although I don't believe it's magically better, I know well its shortcomings too - as long as I can use the hardware and applications I need. I don't care paying for the software - as I pay for the hardware. And I would prefer to pay, so they have to give me something I'm willingly to pay for, not something paid by other interests - especially those of a few big companies making money in a very different way.
BTW: I was installing Ceph from Ubuntu OpenStack.... and it couldn't create OSDs because apparmour blocked access to /dev/md[x] and /dev/rssd[x] devices... a battle between the clumsy way Linux names block devices and the overly complicated profiles of apparmour - again, something bolt-on to address Linux shortcomings. Under Proxmox more or less the same issue, since Proxmox whitelists only a subset of block devices. Different hardware? Good luck...
No. Because video calibration would go out of the window. Calibrating video for an OS running inside another means looking for troubles, and if the monitor is hardware calibrated it's even more difficult - if not impossible. I do also print from Lightroom, and having a good calibration means less inks and paper "wasted" to achieve the wanted result. I should use video pass-through and use the video card directly. That's also true for all the GPU-accelerated features of Lightroom and Photoshop - and they check the underlying video card. Sorry, I don't want to spend the time to get something working, if it is possible
If you don't calibrate your devices, and don't use one of the version with GPU acceleration, that doesn't matter to you, but matters for others.
And why should I every time boot Linux, launch VirtualBox (Oracle owned!) and then boot Windows? Just making life more complex, and what advantages do I achieve?
And that's how many other users think. Again, for most people the OS is irrelevant, or almost. What matters are applications, and how to get something done in the faster and easier way. Only IT people like to tinker with OSes.
I don't like what Windows has become, but neither like many of the FOSS assumptions - many based on ideology and not users' needs.
Why all those router/firewalls running some flavour of Linux are routinely p0wned? Palo Alto, Fortinet, etc... maybe building applications as a bunch of chained shell scripts as if it was 1975 is not a great idea?
Moreover, less diversity, the greates the danger of a a "mass extiction". If a single software rules the world, a critical vulnerability will put the work on its knees.
Unluckily I'm afraid FOSS is the manure of the enshittification process... since you don't have paying customers, only "consumers" - you'll look for other ways to make money. And "consumers" can't complain, they "don't pay" - what they want?? Adapt and shut up.
Because it costs money. Face it. If people had to pay for Linux licenses, it would have gone nowhere. RedHat had to close the CentOS stable because it didn't made enough money. Linux is fine because it is free. Facebook, Google, etc. pays for it a tiny fraction of the money they should have spent if the had to buy an operation system or build their own.
And you see how large is the investment in such embedded systems - a comprehensive application built tailoring the OS deeply? No, a bunch of scripts written by someone cheap enough.
And why Red Hat was sold to IBM? They were forced to sell it? No. They couldn't make enough money, so they sold it to someone who makes money in a different way. Face it, FOSS is not a suitable business model - it means software development is paid by other interests. And that's "enshittification" - the real customers are thoss "other interests". Just the idea of not paying for software makes many people utterly blind to that issue. Greed is never a good advisor.
Why not? Have you ever uses a USB key or phone theter to connect your laptop directly to the Internet? I can secure Windows as much as Linux. People believing Linux is magically secure are those who have their firewalls. routers, and servers easily p0wned. Do you believe that all those breaches around are only on Windows systems? Again, religious beliefs won't make the IT world more secure. And BTW, we really need a niew OS designed for 2025 - not OS designed in the 1970s and 1980s.
I once worked on a project where we used XP Embedded, as the client preferred it. Data transfer was via a USB memory stick.
We got a unit back that was failing diags. Looked into it a bit and found malware on the system. Looked into things a bit more, and...would you believe it, XP Embedded came with autorun *enabled* on the USB ports. The client had used (against instruction) not the supplied memory stick, but some random (infected) one.
We later found out that XP Embedded was just vanilla XP with some of the features removed. I became permanently soured on using MS product on embedded systems. Between the license fees and the security issues, Linux ended up being a smarter choice. It would appear that we were not the only ones to discover that.
So you t knew nothing about Windows hardening and delivered a bad product to a customer. Very few "embedded" Linux are Linux especially compiled for embedded devices. Most of the time, but very specific sectors, they are just "vanilla Linux with some of the features removed". And that's why we see those firewall/routers/VPN concentrators p0wned by the thousands.
This is great and all, but unfortunately many of the programs I use on a day to day basis are trapped on the Windows platform. Poser, Visual Studio (more specifically, C#), Bryce and Melody Assistant have no equivalent Linux versions.
I despise Windows 11, and I can't run it anyway (despite having a well running Xeon and 32GB of RAM, Microsoft demands that I buy a new PC instead), so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place at this point in time.
Interesting: I just got off Melody Assistant's web site and it says right there on the first page that it runs on Linux. Doesn't say anything more than that...including whether it is specific to a particular distro.
And as far as C# is concerned*, you might look into JetBrains' Rider (or ReSharper),and free yourself of yet another sorry-assed piece of Micros~1 detritus.
*Assuming, of course, that you are seriously locked-in to that, and cannot escape...
Can't live without your Microsoft Office programs? You don't need to leave them behind on Linux. Maybe you should, but that's another column. Instead, all you need to do – read closely now – is 1) Open a web browser on your Linux system; 2) Go to https://www.office.com; 3) Sign in with your Microsoft account; and 4) Start running the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps. That's it.
I agree with everything in the article except the above.
As somebody who needs to use Micrsoft Office programs for work, I can positively confirm that going to https://www.office.com is not a solution. The web versions are unusable, as is, to a slightly lesser extend O365 or whatever it is called these days. Us poor souls that need to use MS Office need Office 2019 - there is no other solution.
Us poor souls that need to use MS Office need Office 2019 - there is no other solution.
Really? Why is that? Is it because you are using some esoteric VBA macros?1 Is it that you are using some form of esoteric styles that won't transfer?2 Is it that you are using "long" documents?3 Or is it just that you have read somewhere in an old SO thread (or on Tiktok) that LibreOffice is shite, so you can't be bothered to see for yourself?
Maybe it would be worth another look?
1LO has been able to read and run VBA macros for something like 7 years. Yes the initial implementation was flaky and incomplete. But that was then, and this is now.
2What styles could you possibly be using that LO can't handle? (This is a real question, as My experience with LO has never encountered a problem like this). It is true that earlier versions of LO did occasionally botch some formatting. But that was then (LO 3, in my experience), and this is now. BTW, format transfer between LO and Word is, in many cases, better than format transfer between Word and...Word.
3My personal experience is that LO handles long docs with ease; in some cases with more ease than Word. And my long docs use multipage ToCs and indexes.
I lead a multi (tens of) million Euro programme. The whole thing is run on Excel sheets with complex forumula, styles, macros, pivot tables, etc.
There are much better ways, but it's chronological error - i.e. we've always done it this way.
The client is often the same.
I have at least two of these tracking Excel sheets that will not even display properly in LO.
Macros????
Good grief, surely not, in this day and age. There are plenty of arguments to modernise your system, but you just found a Cybersecurity reason.
Maybe get some actual Project/Programme Management software? Or write your own? You could probably pay someone to make the system you need in Django or similar for much less than the price of a Primavera P6 license
I tried moving to Linux Mint as my daily driver, and I ran into a few issues. The main issue is that my wife uses OneDrive and her Microsoft account to sync data and look/feel configuration between our shared desktop computer and her laptop. Since she also uses the laptop for work, and work requires Windows, switching over to Linux would be disruptive.
Separately, the console peasant who wrote this article clearly doesn't understand that Windows is a superior gaming platform (note to respondents: I am being tongue-in-cheek here). Gaming under Steam is passable with Proton compatibility, but getting non-Steam games working requires dicking around with WINE, which is achievable but inconvenient.
For people who are not using Microsoft add-ons like Windows user profiles and built-in OneDrive sync, etc., then I agree that Linux is a fine choice. It would be a better choice if other parts of the experience were a little slicker and could reproduce some parts of the Windows experience with greater ease.
Name a distro/desktop that will do drag and drop file copy/move on a touch screen.
The much hated upon Windows 8 did this effortlessly 12 yeas ago.
Linux touchsreen support hasn't caught up to where Microsoft was a decade ago.
My septuagenarian mom doesn't even use the laptop I gave her that will run Win11.
The only Linux that matters to her is the kernel that runs her Samsung tablet.
And this as AI assistants are poised to make touchsreens passe.
I've had a media server running Mint for going on 10 years. I like Linux. Outside of servers, it's never had the discipline to match a real commercial product.
P.S. An reply that uses the phrase "install touchegg" will be taken as proving my point.
Though I would share my recent experience with Linux Mint.
But first, before I forget (I'm old), thanks for the memory - someone above mention Unix. When I first got on the internet (late 80's early 90's) you actually had to know some Unix commands. LOL.
I tried Linux many years ago but I found it... difficult and time consuming. I have threatened for several years to make the switch but no time. But after all the recent shitty things MS has pulled I finally did it. WOW, I'm super impressed with the progress since I last tried it. Love Mint. Not only is it much easier/nicer than it used to be but it really blows Windoze away with it's ease to do more techy things where Windows tries so hard anymore to hide (or remove) all the things that allow you to do more than just the usual stuff. For all those reading this that are slightly more techy than the average user you will be glad you tired it.
The only downside is that, as a first try, I loaded Mint into a VM machine on my MS Surface tablet but I can't use it as a tablet as it lacks that ability. Anybody know of a distro that does tablets? I tried looking for a tablet with pre-loaded Linux but there doesn't seem to be much. No worries, as I have many desktops that will be permanently moved to Mint soon. I would also ask for recommendations on a Linux beginner blog where you can read short articles to increase your knowledge when you have only small amounts of time to invest? Or a good Linux reference site I could go to quickly solve an immediate problem? Now if only I had the time to get my Purism Mini (with the Pure OS) up and running.
I tried Mint cinnamon on my tablet. There were just enough annoyances to make me look for something better. I'm currently trying stock Ubuntu (gnome). It's pretty close to Windows out of the box but, as I noted in my post above, there is no drag and drop file copy. There is copy function but if you have to use it often, you'll end up screaming about how the 80s wants their interface back.
Pro tip: If you want to dual boot check out rEFInd boot manager.
Am I the only one that thought that the article was aimed at a slightly different and less technical audience than the readers of this Web site?
PS: The Microsoft 365 applications at office.com are cut-down versions of the corresponding installed MS Office versions as pointed out up screen.
m$ windows + office IS the computer.
No matter how wonderful Linux becomes, 95% of desktop computers WILL be windows because most people use windows/office at work therefore thats the defining thing for a computer. yes they've heard of linux but thats for geeks, nerds and the other inhabitants of the IT department.
Sorry to blow a hole in your arguement but there you go
PS I use Linux mint on the backup PC ands its way better than windows on the games machine
Dunno man, after massively losing patience with Microsoft about 5 years ago my entire company - minus those of us in the software platform team, who used Linux already - switched to Macs. Alright, we sold our souls to Google years before even that, so it's not like we had a massive Windows infra to port over, but Google mail / docs / sheets / meet / kitchen-sink + macbook seems to keep most of our lot pretty happy. TBH were it not for the fact that I build linux kernel modules sort of daily I'd probably be happy with it too. Certainly I'd be happier than I was with Windows 10.
So, you know, that's 400 odd Windows 11 licences Microsoft won't sell now. It might not be many in the grand scheme, but like the coming of small stones that herald the avalanche and all that...
I just don't think that "Windows + Office is everything!" argument flies any more. Things change. A ton of our younger employees have never used Windows because they've never owned a "desktop" before coming to work here. It was tablets and phones all the way for them, and that number will just keep increasing. I'm pretty certain this is why Microsoft are flailing around quite as wildly as they are right now. They need everyone to switch to subscription models that can run MS software on any platform before the momentum really turns against them and makes Windows irrelevant.
UK public sector small organisation: $employer has been moving things to various subscription based externally served services. These services (register system, student database, virtual learning environment, shared drives and all) are accessed via a Web browser.
All that is keeping them on Microsoft at the moment is email and a few admin systems that a larger entity provides (must run on Windows).
Most classroom oriented staff could move over to using a Chromebook right now (no way we would ever get the money for Apple kit).
Inertia dictates that the grandparent Blattodean post will remain valid for 3 to 10 years. After that and the attendant staff turnover I'm not so sure.
What rot.
Here we are, not even 1 year on from the moment when someone very nearly succeeded in achieving global backdoor access through openSSH on all Linuxes by attacking the build system for liblzma, and already there's statements like this being spouted again. No one has actually fixed the general class of problem that enabled that attack.
Linux is only "as intended" if one accepts some wafer-thin trusts.
All software development has a looming wafer thin trust problem. An awful lot of software currently gets written by cut and pasting code found on the internet. The same bits of code get used time and again and is subjected to lots of scrutiny. As time goes on this will be replaced more and more by people asking their favorite AI to write the code which the "author" then admits as having been written by AI or passes it off as his own code. The author becomes prolific and pushes out lots of code. Everything is fine but now we have to trust the AI as it's very hard to tell if the code written by the AI for one user/purpose would be the same for all. An AI trained by a suitably malevolent group could insert backdoor code for a specific developer and inferred application which would not only be hard to detect by eye but also be crafted to be invisible to code analysis tools.
I got a newer computer last week and decided to install Ubuntu. Pretty much everything I was using on Windows works on Linux. Switched my copy of Office 2007 for OnlyOffice which looks pretty similar. Struggled a bit on the weekend converting my windows batch files to bash scripts, but its all good now. So I've got my bicycle gps trace Spatialite database and batch gpx file import running with QGIS front end. And my mkgmap scripts to generate custom Garmin maps for my bike GPS. JOSM OpenStreetMap editor. Kdenlive video editor. I finished setting up GIMP yesterday because unlike the Windows version the batch plugin needs to be compiled separately.
I also installed digiKam for managing my photos. Since most of my photos were taken while cycling I was able to a utility called Geotagging to update all the photos with gps coordinates where they were taking. Unfortunately that required a lot of manual intervention over 2 days. My camera loses about a minute a month requiring constant tweaking of the offset between gps time and camera time. And there was half a year where the camera date was off by a month. By the time I got to the latest images the camera time was off by 53 minutes.
As a compromise to keyboard muscle memory I mapped Windows Key + E to open the Ubuntu file browser.
One piece of advice from an Ubuntu noob, is that when setting up your applications you may want to install Debian packages instead of using the App Center to install Snap packages. With Snap packages being read only I couldn't modify the default document templates for OnlyOffice. And in another instance I couldn't get the current version of an app.
"In all the time I've been running Linux, I've yet to have a single serious security problem." I find myself very curious about this comment by the author, I have run many versions of linux and before that some unix versions and I have had many serious issues.
I am wondering if the author is mistaking the difference between having the issues or noticing them, problems in linux can be very hard to detect. I will add that while I do consider linux to be more secure than windows it too has many security flaws and that in pushing people to adopt it one should explain this rather than suggesting that this would be an impregnable OS.
If all anyone does is open a browser and the check their emails or watch porn, Linux will work fine. Now come to more techie stuff. Let's configure Wake on LAN. See what happens. Oh, lets try to share files between Windows and Linux. Do I use Samba or CIFS and how hard it is to configure? Samba version 2 or 3? What about those pesky spaces in directory names? Can Linux take them? From command line maybe if I wrestle with quotes, but try putting them in a shell script. Can I browse all my computers on the network? Nope. Remote access? VNC or xRDP? Nope too slow and buggy. xRDP will unlock your monitor and anyone can see what you are typing. Nice. VNC? Click and wait several seconds. What about backup? Again struggle with some built in utility which half works. The time spent in setting up a proper PC is way longer on Linux than on Windows. I challenge anyone in the choir to setup all the features on Linux PC with any distro without opening a terminal. I challenge anyone. Setup Wake on LAN, file sharing, backup, remote access without Googling and without opening a terminal.
BTW, is my distro Debian based or is it FreeBSD or Red Hat or what? Where are my programs installed? Is it /usr/bin or /sbin or /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin/local WTH? Will Ubuntu packages work on MX Linux? Nope. What is systemd and what is sysvinit? Should I use GNOME or KDE or Xfce? What is the difference? Oh and don't forget X11...And fonts? Don't even get me started. The fonts are thick and uneven because Microsoft TTF is proprietary and Linux does not even come close. Install packages via Snap and you will regret it. An unending fight with display drivers. dmesg does not even have timestamp so I have no clue what I am looking at. WTH is sudo and why do I need it? I just downloaded something for Linux. How do I install it? I double clicked it and nothing happened. Do I do chmod +x?...Ad infinitum.
I spent about 40 minutes over the weekend setting up my old 2011 MacBook Pro with Linux Mint 22 XFCE edition. No terminal needed whatsoever, everything was set up in a GUI including the update to 22.1, driver installs for the Broadcom WiFi chipset and installing the software I needed from the software catalogue app. Perhaps a terminal is needed for some things (and often I prefer it) but so far I haven't needed to use one.
It felt just as easy as the last Windows 11 setup I did, if not easier. Far less shitware and runs perfectly as a daily driver in a way most people wouldn't expect from a 14 year old laptop.
Similar experience when I installed Mint on my home built desktop system a couple of years back, plus updates since then have all been smooth. (Now on 22.1).
This system has wifi, bluetooth, LAN, wireless gaming mouse etc. All that just worked.
The only single bit of hardware that didn't work out of the box on initial install was the back-light RGB control on my keyboard (an old first gen Corsair Strafe I've had for years now). Although the keyboard itself worked fine, and the back-light did switch on, it was just using defaults, with no control.
A quick search, and I found Ckb-next listed in the software manager, installed, and the RGB control now worked fine.
Most of the above can either be reworded and equally be applied to Windows, or seem to be a skill issue on your part.
Give someone who has never used a computer before, a Windows system, and ask them to do all those things, and you'll have all the same type of issues.
As an example, spaces in path names, oh look, I have a directory called 'Calibre Library' in my home dir, opens terminal, types 'cd Ca' hits tab (autocomplete), hits return, done. Alternately you can just escape the space, so for 'Calibre Library' you type 'Calibre\ Library' (without the quotes). Not exactly difficult stuff. Similar for shell scripts, just put quotes around any variables you might be using spaces within e.g. "$mypath", this is just good practice anyway.
For file sharing, for me it's just right click on a directory icon, and select 'Sharing options', (this uses Samba), although for me personally, I do all filesharing via a NAS (also Linux), not directly on my desktops (I just browse on the desktop to the network shares, then bookmark the ones I use regularly).
Erm, you do know FreeBSD is not Linux??
Quote: 'Where are my programs installed?' why do you care? You could ask the same for Windows, has it gone under 'Program Files', 'Program Files (x86)', 'Program Files\WindowsApps', or has it been hidden somewhere under AppData, or some other custom location? But again, who cares, does the program work?
Display drivers updates are built into the software manager, and just work, have for me anyway for years now. No fighting required. Easier than Windows.
When choosing a used PC on which to try Linux, I recommend avoiding "consumer" gear. I have had very good luck with Dell Latitude and Precision laptops, but I can't recommend HP, and definitely stay far away from Sony and Dell's consumer line.
If you swing that way, gaming motherboards seem to be a good buy, gamers always want the latest and need to get rid of the previous rev...my desktop is a Gigabyte GA-Z170X off eBay for something around $100. I already had a case, power supply, etc, and the CPU is a used pull off eBay as well. No trouble with either of the eBay items. One advantage to running 3-5 year old gear...the prices on CPU and memory are pretty low compared to bleeding edge stuff. The 2016 vintage stuff I'm running seems good enough for me.
I've had some luck with HP stuff, ranging from an ancient Core2Duo 12.5" machine, a nice little 2013-ish 11" Elitebook 2170 and a 2015 Core i5 Elitebook.
The i5 Elitebook became a daily driver last year to replace a slightly unwell MacBook Pro (since repaired). 16GB ram, a nice big SSD and a new battery off iFixit...it copes with everything I throw at it including light gaming, running MX Linux.. Makes a good streaming machine for holidays too with a rather lovely 1080p screen.
It weighs about the same as the 2021 Dell Latitude I use for work, yet runs far cooler and is just as snappy for most tasks.
with quotes like this
I see them as spyware.
Then you go and ruin it all by promoting Office online. Doh! Do you think that MS is NOT spying on you there. After all, you make it easy by singing in with yout MS account.
Please go back to the naughty step and learn that any interaction with Microsoft is a chance for them to suck your data without you giving them explicit permission.
The same goes for Google who are probably worse.
You were doing so well with Unix. Yes, I used Ultrix on a VaxStation 2000 back in the day.
Then you ruined it. You failed miserably Mr Nichols.
>while running Linux servers
facebook does not run servers that just run the kernel, Linux, as that would fail to boot. They run systemd/Linux.
That's a bit like writing that a certain car runs; "name of transmission".
"while running CentOS Stream" and later also pointing out that CentOS uses the kernel, Linux would not mislead people, but of course not.
>Today, anyone smart enough to use Windows, a very low bar indeed
It's a high bar - the user interface is very complicated and broken, there are countless bugs that have not been fixed and there's at least 7 separate settings programs (control panel, settings, regedit, PATH menu, boot settings, system database settings, explorer settings etc) - but people are taught that microsoft's interfaces are computing, so they don't even realize how broken they are.
Children find the Sugar interface much easier to use for a reason and anyone who doesn't try to exactly replicate steps memorized on windows realizes that GNU/Linux DE's are much easier to use.
>Can't live without your Microsoft Office programs?
The license clearly state that they aren't yours and if you use them, you belong to microsoft.
>If you prefer, there are many great free – not one penny – open source programs. Instead of Office, you can try LibreOffice
LibreOffice is free software, dual licensed under the Lesser GPLv3-only and Mozilla public License version 1.1 not "open source".
It happens to be gratis, but that is of lesser concern.
"If you prefer, there are many great free software programs that respect your freedom, that also happen to be gratis. Instead of Office, you can try LibreOffice" - but of course not.
It's really amazing how much proprietary malware is recommended.
>Linux was built securely.
It's hard to say that as they keep adding more proprietary software.
GNU was indeed built with a secure design, although security is not the focus.
>For instance, Mint only needs 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended)
That's a proprietary distro and Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre works great on 2GB of RAM until you open Abrowser.
>There are several smaller vendors that offer Linux. >ThinkPenguin
"ThinkPenguin, Inc. was founded in 2008 to improve support for GNU/Linux and other free software operating systems."
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/about
>Contrast that with CentOS and Ubuntu where you have to start again each time.
Both of those distros do have release upgrade tools and if you like pain you can upgrade manually just fine.
For many users, even if they had to start again every time that wouldn't matter, as well you can just copy over the /home and /etc directories (if you use systemd features, that increases the complexity of what to copy over, but you'll know what to copy) and you can expect things to work or be fixable, unlike trying to copy over windows users and configs if the in-situ update fails.
Been using Debian for 20+ years and never had to reinstall for a major release.
Granted, that hasn't all been on the same machine, but I have machines that have gone from Woody to Lenny, Lenny to Stretch, Stretch to Bookworm.
https://www.debian.org/releases/
I am usually on Sid though, so my updates come when I want them, not just because there is a release
Quite. I find that I don't often need to re-install Debian (or FreeBSD, my other main platform) from scratch.
And when I do, it's usually because I've gotten new hardware. Even then, sometimes I can just move the sysdisk. Maybe change a network interface name or so, and carry on.
The lack of ease doing the same thing on (RHEL or) CentOS 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 was a large consideration in my return to Debian years ago.
My only regret is I ever left in the first place, but to be fair to me, most of the $JOBS I had at the time were at Red Hat shops, so running my personal kit on Fedora or CentOS had some benefit. Nowdays I don't care what any potential $JOB does.
My Dad used Mint until his demise at 83.
As an ex-accountant, he preferred Calc to Excel but basically he needed 3 thing: A browser, OpenOffice and e-mail, so this catered for his needs.
It was less onerous for me to support as well as it just worked. I didn't get phone calls every 5 minutes in his Windows days.
Windows is just too inefficient - Linus has always been the better system and before that UNIX.
Can confirm the non-tech family member support burden is FAR lighter with Linux than with Windows. I supplied my late brother with a PC, loaded with Windows, and received several calls a month about "Windows not working". I finally got fed up and converted him to Linux. After teaching him the basics, and turning on automatic updates, I had perhaps one or two calls a year.
It's very odd that you give credit to Linus for things he didn't do.
He maintains a nice process scheduler and some drivers, but he doesn't maintain any browsers, office software or email clients.
Before the kernel, Linux there was GNU and GNU is the system that actually gives developers what they need to write and run desktop environments, browsers, office software and email clients (a process scheduler and some drivers for peripherals are no good if you don't have a build system, a compiler, a linker, a libc, a binutils and much, much more).
As I have said since Dapper Drake, if Linux on the desktop was going to happen, then it would have by now.
Yes, I (as a nerd) happily run a Linux laptop (with Mint, if you ask). However no amount of proselyting can shift the dial on the hundreds of users I have had the opportunity to try and push to desktop linux.
And no amount of feeding the reasons back to "the community" has ever been picked up.
At this stage of the game, I can only assume the community has no interest in desktop linux as a corporate entity.
First I'll state that I'm 73. I've been seeing "year of unix on the desktop" (and I include Linux in with unix) for the last 45 of them. Now the previous oldest man in the world died recently at 116. So my question is if I equal his record will I see the "year of unix on the desktop" or will Windows still be dominant?
I do have a Linux (Mint Cinnamon) PC, a LibreElec PC (and a RPi4) , 2 W7 PCs (how dare he say W7 has retired) and a W11 PC. WINE has improved tremendously over the years but what's really needed is a scenario where I can connect a Linux PC to a Windows PC and have the Linux machine suck all my programs and data over and just run them. As someone once said "I have a dream"
One day later the Reg gives us this:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/29/nvidia_gpu_ubuntu_downgrade/
Were this to happen during a Windows upgrade (as it does) there would be headlines here and people saying it's time for Linux desktops for all, because Linux is forever. Except it's not.
In a perfect world were the legacy drivers to be maintained forever this wouldn't happen but it's not a perfect world. Old Linux distros die and disappear too, with Absolute Linux being "possibly" the latest.
Yeah, for *years*, Nvidia boards have been a nagging thorn in Linux's side. I know, I have one. Made the mistake, once, of "upgrading" to the latest version of the driver, got a blank screen on boot, then had to figure out how to revert to the older driver configured on install. I now know (or knew) how to revert the Nvidia driver and how to recover from a black screen on boot (it involves, IIRC, the on-board chipset video) and, more importantly, "IF IT WORKS, DON'T FIX IT!"
I do find it useful to have a second Linux system for "experiments" and not to get too clever with my daily driver. Also, backups are a Good Thing.
1. Most "desktops" are laptops these days, and Linux can struggle with graphics drivers, wifi, sleep as well as deprecation.
2. If you need only a web browser, yes Linux can be an option for "desktop" usage.
3. It is still tinkarooland and finicky hunt for packages depending specific needs outside "firefox".
Linux is still not good enough for a heavy gamer such as myself.
Certainly not for anything involving Virtual Reality which I use almost daily using my Oculus Rift-S.
The majority of the games in Steam work only on Windows and I don't think that Linux could handle games Like CyberPunk 2077 or GTA properly.
I am aware that Linux Gaming is possible but it's also sometimes time consuming in terms of problem solving.
Having said that, Linux is definitely on the right path to be a replacement for Windows for gaming.
I'm 100% agree on having Linux as a working machine and used Linux Mint as well and it's fantastic.
As an IT guy, I would love to see offices switching to Linux as the main OS and break Microsoft monopoly.
Cheers.
I don't know about Oculus (i can't stand Facebook/Meta and will have nothing to do with them) but HTC Vive and Vive Pro* works perfectly out of the box with Steam (I'm running Debian, X.Org, KDE)
And I don't know about Cyberpunk, but Stalker2 which is similarly resource-heavy works as well as or better than it does on Windows, with no special tweaks. Even mods work fine. Helldivers 2, System Shock remake, returnal, Aliens Fireteam, Dead Effect 2 (VR), plenty of big games for single and multi player, I rarely find one that doesn't work. I certainly dispute your claim about "the majority of games on Steam". Just "Enable SteamPlay for all titles"
In the very rare cases where I find one that doesn't work on Linux, Steam have been kind enough to refund it, even though it was never advertised as supporting Linux or SteamPlay/Proton
* except for the WiGig wireless adapter, which uses a proprietary Intel PCIe card, which is not currently supported by Linux
Just my experience, but I'm a Linux desktop gamer here, and a VR user, both on Linux. Although can't comment specifically on the Oculus side of things (Index user here).
I have a couple of desktops...
Desktop 1: None VR system. My main gaming rig: AM4 5800X3D + 6900XT, and an Ultrawide 3440 x 1440. Using Mint Cinnamon, with dual boot into Windows 10.
Both CyberPunk 2077 and GTA work perfectly. In fact in the early days of CyberPunk, when lots of people were complaining about performance issues, crashes etc. Mine was working fine, performance was a little poor (like everyone at the time), but I never had any of the crashing other people seemed to be having.
The only game I can't run reliably is MS Flight Sim (2020/4th anniversary edition), hmm, I wonder why! This is currently the only game I boot into Windows for.
Latest game to play has been Assassin's Creed Mirage (via Steam), no issues, and that uses the annoying Ubisoft Connect launcher.
Desktop 2: Dedicated VR system. Also AM4, using a hand-me-down 3800X CPU + 7800XT with a Valve Index.
(Dedicated as my office where my main gaming rig is located is quite small, so this set-up lives hidden in a cupboard in the open plan dining/kitchen area, as it's the biggest room in the house!).
This uses Arch Linux (same as the Steam Deck), specifically EndeavourOS. This was done due to issues I had under Mint when using VR on my main system (this before building the dedicated VR rig).
As this was a new system, I thought I'd try Arch first, as that's what Valve are using for the Steam Deck, with the backup plan being to install Windows if really needed.
So far everything I've tried has just worked. That includes for example The Gallery, The Lab, Beat Saber, Space Pirate Trainer, Half Life Alyx, Helblade (VR version) etc.
I was planning on making the system dual boot, so Arch and Windows, but so far haven't bothered installing Windows on the VR system.
Notes:
Almost everything I play is via Steam, so Linux support is built in.
Also I'm using AMD GFX in both systems, and I've heard that AMD makes things easier, as their Linux driver support is much better than say NVIDIA.
The bottom line is, I'm not going back to Windows on a personal system.
I call on every techie to install Linux Mint on their family members' computers when they become obsolete. I have an almost 20 year old desktop running with Linux Mint and although I don't use it often it's there when I need it. My main desktop runs Mint too, although I have to confess my laptop runs Windows 10, since I develop Windows software and make a living with it.
But the gist is that by simply helping family members migrate to Linux Mint people can increase the market share of Linux many percentage points, which will lead ISV's to notice. Apple's Mac OS X market share has already dropped below 8% and I'm convinced that many ISV's will drop support for Mac in the future since it isn't profitable. Wouldn't it be great if they started supporting Linux Mint instead?
"Or you could just buy a Linux PC that is all set up and ready to go. Of the big PC names, Dell and Lenovo both offer Linux desktops and laptops".
I asked Dell about availability of laptops with Linux installed on 27th January. Their Sales department inform me that Dell no longer supply laptops pre-loaded with Linux, only W11 Home or Pro. Lenovo do still offer laptops with a choice of Ubuntu flavour when I checked earlier today.
I’m too far invested in a Windows dev env - VS and SQL Server for the db hosted elsewhere for my domain. As a retired dev who likes to update the ASPX web app and has no desire to rewrite 20+ years worth of improvements what are my best options? WINE? Dual boot and keep Win xx anyway?
(Disclaimer - I'm a retired 'techie' with 50 years experience on mainframes under my belt)
I've been using Windows for many years and I'm very satisfied with it. With the looming EOS for WIN10 though, I decided to try and move to Linux.
Oh Dear!
As has been said, there's way too many versions to choose from. I eventually settled on Ubuntu.
Yes, it installs. Yes I can navigate around user interface.
Use it to do at least some of the things I use Windows for? Not a chance!
Tried to fire up Libre office to load a worksheet and the first thing it wants to do is create a database of some sort.
Tried to use VLC to rip a DVD - that works, but it selects the soundtrack from a different title on the DVD.
Tried to get a Hauppage TV stick working - Nope! Patches won't install.
Had to buy a new scanner for copying documents, since the one I've been using for so long is not supported. Again, the necessary patches won't install
The only thing I can get working to my satisfaction is Opera for browsing.
Try to use almost any support site for help and some wanky power-drunk 'moderator' tells you that you're not supposed to post 'that sort of query here'...
If you do actually find some documented help that looks like it be the answer, more often that not it's out of date.
Linux is a tool for the enthusiast, not the Joe Public end user.
I know this will fall on deaf ears and get a lot of downvotes but the issue of switching from Windows to Linux on the desktop isn't that it can't be done (easily). It's that there are so many pieces of software out there that just aren't made for Linux and no real effort has been made to address that problem. Just for a minute, imagine that you're using a PC for something besides pointless web browsing and personal productivity software. Imagine you are using it to run software for other hobbies (in my case, motorsports) and that those hobbies use software that is Windows only. On top of that, those software packages actually interact with hardware (e.g. USB ports, COM ports, etc.) and support for that level of stuff just isn't there in Linux(Wine). Yeah, it sucks. But until we get all of those little pocket industries to start adopting Linux like they have Windows/Mac, it will continue to be a barrier to greater adoption.
And yes the kernel IS forever... IF you are a total DIY.
If not, software "fashion of the day" rules.
I will point to a couple of notable fashions:
Pulse Audio... Now pretty well discontinued in what is likely the most used (if by count only) distros, Raspberry PI OS.
dhcpcd, also discontinued (os should be) in Raspberry PI OS (find me and I'll explain why it should die)
There are other fashions I can point to, but I fear I may have already started a flame war.
Just my old neck beard opinion
Worth what you paid for it.
Out of the gate this articles author can't help but twist himself into a pretzel, an extreme O/S limbo contest.
Within the first full paragraph the author shows his lack of hands-on knowledge of Windows 11, going straight for the AI Recall feature. A feature requiring the Snapdragon AI neural processor, which a very small percentage of systems having it or users that own them. Then to compound his problem he states; "Today, anyone smart enough to use Windows, a very low bar indeed, can use desktop Linux.", in a stroke crushing Linux users down to the "very low bar indeed" of Windows users. Who's side is this guy on?
Justifying this he moves on to comparing Windows 11 to "that stinker" Vista with the insistence of sticking with the nearly 16 year old Windows 7 O/S, which will reach it's 16th year the week after Windows 10 is retired on Oct 14, 2025. Even moving to Linux he wants the look of Windows 7, the outdated functions and compatibility of Windows 7 in Linux. Clearly stating that Linux will run "on pretty much anything", later describing the cream of Linux hardware as "scrapheap PCs". Leading up to this he pushes gaming on Linux, gaming on the premium Linux rigs with 2 -4 GB of RAM, 20 - 100 GB of storage (hard drive) space at the eye popping resolution of 1024 x 768 of his "scrapheap PCs". Even with the low memory foot print of Linux, there are few games that will run respectably on those hardware specs. In the authors defense here, he does suggest moving to a gaming console (Playstation) for serious gaming, but it does not lessen his hurt on Linux.
Before this the article criticizes the security of Windows, with the monthly security updates, requiring a TPM and of course waving off the need of antivirus software on Linux. There are currently 6,692 distinct vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, version 6.13 has 228 vulnerabilities for the rc4 update, generating 60 new CVEs per week. With Linux wide spread deployment on servers alone, it would seem security would be of some concern. It is shown that a majority of Linux administrators and users do not install additional security after the initial install, scoffing at even the need for a TPM. Recommending the use of 20 year old PCs to run Linux, as if time has stood still. Reminds me of the NASA mentality of the O-rings and foam strikes. Their "it never hurt us before" mentality that costing 14 astronauts their lives. Linux DOES run critical systems in, banking, Government, Military and infrastructure, so lives are at stake with it's security, despite their casual attitude and arrogance in the default security of Linux.
Seems to me that the author only managed to crush and twist Linux to the "very low bar indeed" of Windows, his words. While trying painfully to boast the virtues of Linux in comparison. FAIL!!
Around 10 years ago, when I saw a pop-up that said my Windows 7 would be automatically "upgraded" to Windows 8 within a certain amount of time, I immediately downloaded a program to block that from happening. At that moment, I knew the industry had permanently switched from a customer-serving model to a vendor-serving one.
I swore that I would continue using Windows 7 until either something bad happened as a result of using it, or until some use case stopped working on it for which there were no reasonable alternatives. To this date, I'm still running it, and in fact have expanded my usage of it to three additional PCs. And with the ease of accessing newer operating systems through VMs and remote desktop, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where I will feel the need to "upgrade" in the forseeable future. And if I do, it will almost certainly be moving individual use cases over to a parallel PC running something like Linux Mint.
As there are quantities of Linux afficionados here, a question, for when I finally switch to Linux...
I currently have W10, partitioned to C: for opsys, then E: for current data, F: for archive data, then I have a set of timed and appropriately structured auto backups using Macrium Reflect to a flying USB drive or two. This has worked great for years now.
When I've looked at Linux (usually Mint), I've not so far found a comparable backup program, certainly not via the Linux built-in software installer. Any recommendations? TIA!
I have Debian installed, with most things on LVM (Logical Volume Manager, similar to the one in Windows but a lot more powerful) including / (aka the root filesystem - kind of like C:, but in Linux, everything forms one hierarchy with filesystems 'mounted' as directories, with root at the top) Only /boot and the damned "UEFI system partition" are 'physical' partitions, because those are the things that the bootloader and "bios" need.
I have a LV for / and one for /usr ( /usr is roughly equivalent to "Program Files") another for /var (kind of like C:\ProgramData) and /home (a bit like C:\Users or your E:)
I don't have a special one for archive data aside from backups, if I did, I might make a mountpoint at /opt/archive or something
I also have a separate 'plaintext' disk with LVs for /opt/steam (my Steam library) and /mnt/backup (backups being optionally encrypted separately, and can easily be thrown onto a removable disk)
But two nice features about LVM is that the partitions are resizable at runtime (if I run out of space, I can just allocate some more) and it also supports snapshots, whereby data is frozen in its current state and it stores the difference, again doable at runtime. I'm sure there are some GUI tools for managing them, apparently lvm2-gui is a thing but I haven't used it personally.
You can either use a snapshot temporarily to create a static backup (a bit like 'volume shadow copy'), or use it permanently, (a bit like a system restore point).
But for /home (C:\Users) i would use an additional file-based backup tool like 'BorgBackup' or one of many GUI tools, and/or Syncthing to another PC/NAS
Is there a good way of backing up all the custom conf files one is forced to amend to have a Linux working system? I have customised /etc/samba/smb.conf; /etc/fstab; grub, nut-config files.../pipewire etc and lose track. However, with a re-install, it is a mtter of rewriting all of these. Any good way to keep track of which ones have been customised and backing up between say Ubuntu upgrades.
As I take backup seriously (ex VMS system mangler) I am in the process of moving to MX Linux, which includes as default a 'snapshot' utility, which backs up your entire system (or as much of it as you choose) to a bootable '.iso' file - remember remastersys - which can be used e.g. using Ventoy or copied using a supplied MX utility to make a bootable medium.
All in all an excellent distro, *great* support! (personal opinion, experience since Knoppix on diskettes)
It's fun to read the same old yada yada yada about Linux every time a new version of Windows is released or discontinued. What most Linux advocates don't understand is that Windows users don't need Linux at all, because Windows does everything they want, like and need. It's that simple.
I regret to inform you that 2025 will not be the "year of Linux on the desktop" that has been repeated over and over since the 90s :)
Does my W10 PC at work do everything I want, like and need? More or less, but that's not the issue. What I don't like is the random software issues, M$ moving things around seemingly for the hell of it after every update and ClippyPilot installing itself into various places across the system with behaviour that's effectively malware.
Outlook started opening links in Edge the other day rather than Firefox, despite the default browser settings in Windows not having changed.....who seriously wants behaviour like this from anything they use on a daily basis? Windows tends to be used because it's remained prevalent, not because it's good - just like McDonalds.
An oft-neglected issue in these discussions: Windoze-only apps.
I have at the last count 15 apps which are Windows only, not many have Apple versions, and none of them have Linux versions, nor do they have browser-based interfaces, nor are there Linux equivalents. Mine include an offline mapping app for navigation and tracking whilst in the mountains, ditto an interface to GPS wearables, an ECG app to go with the device you stick to your chest, a book authoring program, etc etc. I'm a long-term FF and Thunderbird user so that's not a problem, but I do Other Stuff than web and mail.
There's also the issue of compatibility of MS Office alternatives - the cloud based versions have so many features cut out that half of my spreadsheets wouldn't work, and the format glitches when you port more complex Word documents to Libre Office etc don't play well when exchanging documents with MS users.
The problem is a Catch 22 - that until Linux becomes widely-enough used, the writers of general apps who target Windows and Mac won't do the hard work of porting to Linux, but until they are available, non-experts won't go to Linux. And Windows emulators need to have come on a long way from when I last tried them: not "just works" but "just didn't work".
Would mapnik work for your use case? Although for mountaineering, I would have thought a phone with OsmAnd would be more suitable.
Also, I have heard good things (on this thread) about OnlyOffice
There's a bunch fo very good F/OSS mapping tools, I use QMapShack to edit/create GPX tracks and create custom maps.
For offline tracking when out and about, use OSMAnd. It works really well.
GadgetBrigde has compatibility for some GPS wearables. Usual rules apply, choose the software first and then pick the hardware that supports it.
It doesn't quite do everything my Wife wants. She'd like it to to work consistently on a day to day basis. Apparently it'd be useful if the start menu didn't go on holiday at random.
The serious point is, we're in one of those phases where the quality control from MS has dropped low enough it's pissing the 'I just want it to work' majority of users off. Probably nowhere near enough for it to be the year of Linux on the Desktop, but maybe enough for MS to push people to subscriptions where the PC software is nothing but a shell for a browser.
Yeah, inside Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu installation. Sure, I've got Win7 and Win10 in there, all set to run old legacy software if/when the need arises (less and less as the days go by).
I just took an "image" of my old system, then I reformatted with Ubuntu and got that all working hunky-dunky then installed Virt-Manager and then resurrected my old Win environment.
I have a motherboard that can run two GPUs so I got the nVidia one for Linux (weird eh?) and the AMD Vega one for the virtual machines. So that way, they can have their own GPU for their own full graphic acceleration, just like a real computer.
EXCEPT... NOT a real computer. No sir. This time, I have Backups and Snapshots and I installed the defeatured Ghost Spectre "light" version, and there's no virus detection (pfft who cares, if it gets infected I'll just roll back a Snapshot).
What I did was I installed a Samba share of one of my Linux folders, and I use that to transfer data to/from the Windows and the macOS and the Solaris VMs. So the actually valuable "data" all resides within Linux, and Windows/macOS are merely software applications that run inside Linux in order to facilitate old legacy software that I'm seeing less and less use of, to be frank. Oh, what the H the SSD space is pretty cheap nowadays, "why not" keep the old OS environments for old-times sake. It's not like they take up any physical room.
Many Penguinistas hail Linux's long support tail, but they take a *very* myopic view on the whole subject.
1. If you have a discrete GPU, the drivers will only be maintained for so long and then become incompatible with the latest kernels. So you either have to junk the hardware, or run older (vulnerable) kernels.
2. If you have older software then the support within desktop Linux, is in a word, woeful. You either need to upgrade the software (see above), accept you can never upgrade, or get into shenanigans with VMs and passthrough (brittle and prone to failure)
3. At this point they'll scream "Oh, but use the free drivers!" which means ditching functionality your software may require or accepting a massive performance hit
4. If you encounter problems (e.g. an upgrade completely wrecking your install), then good luck getting any support. Take a Linux PC to almost any computer shop and they will point blank refuse to look at it
The thing Penguinistas for get is that a PC is an applicance to most people. It exists to do a job and the instant it can't, it's garbage. Penguinistas cannot conceive a of a life beyond hacking kernel switches and loading self-compiled modules. They think this is normal and it is far from.
PC is tool. Tool work? Tool good. Tool no work? Replace tool. End of.
A car is a tool, but in this age of all modern cars being "connected cars" spying on their users and requiring cloudy software updates and subscription-enabled features, would you sneer at people advocating a way around that?
"Penguinistas cannot conceive a of a life beyond hacking kernel switches and loading self-compiled modules. They think this is normal and it is far from."
I've been using desktop Linux since late 2019. Last time I remember having to compile a driver was for an intel network card in 2012 for some random ancient Linux based appliance that needed fixing but what you're saying has zero relevance to my daily use. I wouldn't even remember how to do it at this point.
"PC is tool. Tool work? Tool good. Tool no work? Replace tool. End of."
Which, is exactly why I replaced Windows 10 with OpenSuse and binned off Windows after over 25 years. I turned up at stupid o'clock on a call out and lost my laptop for 45 minutes to a feature update I didn't ask for, know about and was, in fact, supposed to be disabled by policy. Tool no work.
I only picked Suse at the time in a 'try something... anything!' moment, setting up a dual boot with a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I'd need to run back to Windows after a few weeks (because whilst learning my way around another OS might be interesting, it couldn't become a hindrance to work). But I didn't, because I kept saying 'oh, that's handy!'.
If I've ever had a desktop Linux go belly up on me it's because I broke it. I don't need my OS doing that for me on an unplanned basis. If Windows actually worked, I'd still be defaulting to using it.
I suspect that 'Linux is too complicated to give to users!' comes largely from people that have learned a bit about doing things Windows beyond the basics but have very little underlying computing knowledge. The tinkerers and Linus Tech Tips viewers that fancy themselves as a bit tech savvy. The people that go out of their way to recommend £250 routers with 8 antenna sticking out the top to co-workers who mention that their Netflix buffered once last night. They really only have enthusiasm and being 'brought up' on Windows on their side. They know how to do stuff but they don't understand core principles under it. They're the ones that are going to struggle with Linux and they won't enjoy that because they can't feel good about their skillz.
I've guess I've also seen people struggle because they've been presented with it and immediately gone into 'make it like Windows!' mode rather than spending five minutes trying things as intended.
Techies and the 'Penguinistas' will be fine. As will 'push icon, program load, all good!' users.
Opinion is one thing, but where did the bias come from?
"Windows 11 sucks almost as much as Vista – remember that stinker?"
Is there any evidence for Windows 11 as a 'stinker'? Windows 11, its improved security apart, works pretty much the same way as Windows 10, and that is not labelled as a 'stinker'.
"In addition, Windows 11 is less of a desktop operating system than it is a remote Microsoft client equipped with AI-powered Recall, telemetry, and data collection.
Recall requires a special chip which most computers don't have - so it's not as if Recall can be snuck onto a typical Windows 11 system. As for telemetry and data collection, telemetry is data which makes it possible to provide a better quality of product - so this a good thing - and many systems collect data, including The Register.
You can even have a distro that boots from and lives on a usb stick I.e. you don't even have to install it on on your PC.
Have a look at Porteus. It's based on slack and still has a few wrinkles but is available for 32bit & 64bit x86, BIOS and UEFI boot and has a variety of GUIs including XCFE and MATE
I wouldn't recommend it for a novice (at least for setting it up) but, for the likes of us here, it's a useful Linux-In-Your-Pocket(tm) recovery tool.
Got round to another try of Linux on our laptop we use hooked up to the telly. Mint 22.1 Xfce. Wireless mouse would not work (ffs, when it has worked on earlier versions), and the drivers dialogue was of no use. The correct driver was installed, it just didn't work. Sometimes I ask myself with Linux, is it worth the bother which seems inevitable at one point or another. Support fora of no use, either. And no, it wasn't the mouse's battery.
Bluetooth mouse? You probably want the Bluetooth menu rather than 'drivers'.. And you need to put the mouse into it's pairing mode, etc. It can be a faff initially, but no more so than on Windows, at least when Bluetooth itself is working. (My experience is with KDE on Debian, and it my Bluetooth MX Master 'just worked')
Any mice i have used have been either USB HID (no driver needed) or Bluetooth, what is yours?
So, booted off pen drive, installed Mint (parallel to W7), install sequence didn't like me trying to find Edinburgh as location, also baulked at me changing the selected disk sizes. First install failed with a loop of "this failed do you want to try again?" Try again, fail again. Tried to say just continue, but the progress was glacial and uninformative. Decided it had broken. Shut it down, booted off pendrive again, hit install, left defaults. Less informative progress info than I would expect, but it got there. Booted off hard drive, Grub does not appear. Many swear words. Need Grub for SWMBO to get to Windows. Forum next to useless, lots of people with similar problems, lots of suggestions, none of which work for the poster, or me. Software manager says it's installed. Removed Grub, rebooted, reinstalled Grub, no joy. Linux help page says fiddle with Grub settings, files are read only. At this point, I just gave up and reinstalled my W7 image. TGF Macrium. 2 minutes and done.
And I've put several versions of Linux on this very same laptop over time with none of this rowlocks, the last one was a Linux Lite which automagically stopped working for some reason.
Cannae be ersed, that's several hours of what little is left of my life wasted. Is Linux getting worse?
Can you link to the forum post that describes your issue?
TBH as mentioned earlier i have little personal experience with Mint and always use Debian. It has a very reliable install process for me, but still it could perhaps be offputting for the average member of the public, because it is designed to be flexible for power users
Then there must either be a hardware problem or it's a very unusual rodent. What 'driver' did you try to install? (It shouldn't need one, and trying to install a special one could be why it is broken).
It should show up in 'lsusb' as a USB Human Interface Device, and 'hd /dev/input/mice' should print hex to the terminal when you move it. If all that is as normal, then it's perhaps an issue with the display manager and not the mouse. If you are using Wayland, try xorg instead
In any case, i'm surprised and disappointed, and frustrated because whatever it is is fixable.
Do other mice work on the same system? Does this mouse work on other systems (without special drivers)? What mouse is it?
Edit: ignore all that, just read your other post, glad it is working
Win 11 would not run Etcher no way in hell
Win 10 would via USB but whacked my 64gb usbs down to 5mb. Wouldn't run it from any partition though even under admin with full control
Back to win 11 to reformat the usbs exFAT and stick on the ISO and Etcher.
Back to win 10 to run Etcher and flash the boot to the other USB.
Back to win 11 to do the install
Changed the BIOS order on the win 11 box
Yeah, year if the Linux desktop... Can't see my mum doing it.
I’m not a full on nerd. I’m moderately capable in windows but I have a reflexive shudder if I have to word on the command line. That it has felt like the command line is where you have to work in Linux to get functionality appears to be fine to those who are in that space already, but it’s a barrier.
I have tried to get Linux going on a home machine multiple times. Multiple variants. I have tried with the sincere desire to leave windows behind but it ends up too painful and hard to get things going. If it was as simple as most of this thread have suggested, it would be more popular than it is. I have worked with engineers (not IT or software people) for twenty years. If I’d found anyone in that tone who was running Linux I’d have used them to assist me but I’ve never seen a Linux person in the wild. In comparison, I have managed to install and operate windows machines whole not asking much of them for almost every flavour of windows since 95.
I expect to be shot down, but this is what I’ve observed. If Linux was straight forward to use, or support was easy, I’d have been on it years ago.
I put Mint on a new laptop just a few months ago and I'm not going back It was easier than getting Win11 set up, which I was forced to do because the computer would not allow me access to the bootup menu until I let M$ fully load and get access to the internet to ping home. Since day 1, M$ has not seen hide nor hair of my new laptop despite being dual boot, and once I verify one last program I plan to reload Mint, wiping Win11 altogether.
I stopped reading when I hit "Start running the web versions of..." Cliud-based apps are still slow, sluggish, and poor shadows of the native versions and, at least where the owner can make them so, a lot more expensive.
The reality is that while Linux may be better, it still lacks enough support. Too many programs or features are not supported. I'm a senior developer for a well-known global brand, and I write their code on a Linux system, but we still need Windows machines as too many things don't work correctly (or at all) or have no decent support on Linux. Linus is primarily open source - so you're at the mercy of the who knows who!
While I'd love to dump Windows for Linux, although closer than ever, we aren't there yet.
Glad I don’t have to deal with Windows and glad the only alternatives are not all Linux.
Sure you need Mac hardware but that hardware is decent and boy have second hand Macs gotten cheaper recently.
My life is just simpler since moving to macOS and the OS really does just stay out of the way so I can get on with what matters.
And app compatibility is really broad, being able to run most apps people have highlighted as being incompatible with Linux in the comments here.
I admit that I have a minority use case, but here goes:
I currently run a Windows 10 desktop machine exclusively at home. My wife uses a Chromebook. I have had good experiences of installing Linux onto PC hardware over the past 15-20 years. I really like the streamlined simplicity of an OS which provides the interface layer between applications and the hardware, without any fuss.
However, my main hobby is creating music. In the past, this meant hardware synths / effects and perhaps recording and mixing in a DAW. Recently, I have made the transition to working completely In-The-Box, and I'm loving it. The main trouble is that the best selection of (high-quality) DAWs and plug-ins are targeted exclusively towards Windows and Apple platforms, with no Linux support. For various reasons, I'm not going to switch to the Apple universe, so I'm stuck with using Windows on PC hardware.
My DAW is Reason 12 (no Linux support).
I use paid-for VST instruments and effects from Arturia (no Linux support), G-Force (no Linux support) and Cherry Audio (no Linux support).
I also use many free-of-charge VSTs, which generally don't support Linux, and some are even exclusive to the Windows platform.
Now, I'm getting as fed up as anyone with how terrible an experience the Windows ecosystem has become over the past few years. Unfortunately, however much I'd like to change over to Linux, I'm really, really tied to Windows for the foreseeable future.
As I said at the start, I have a minority use case. However, even a tiny minority of the millions of Windows users throughout the world is a significant total in absolute terms.
The word many does not equal "various".
Mind, I am also slightly surprised at the reticence, since every single person I know in the music/production business (and that's quite a few) are exclusively Mac, and wouldn't dream of using Windoze.
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