So Guys, Windows 10 will be "over" this October....What do you guys have planned?

[duderino84]

This year is when Windows 10 will officially be "End of Life". One of the key issues that arises is, Windows 11 wants to push a lot of users to buying straight up new computers over a TPM chip (Trusted Platform Module) because Microsoft wants everyone to think they'll be that much more secure online.




Until last year, I had prettymuch been a Windows user that adapted to the natural discontent towards Windows, that I now add "as a service" after mention because, well, it is.

Has anyone considered trying "Free and Open Source Software" (FOSS)?

Despite getting popular, Linux has remained scary to a lot of users:
https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...oaching-45-for-first-time-could-hit-5-by-1q25

If anyone is lacking the cash, has any additional free time to learn, or doesn't want to buy another PC, there's plenty of options:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/seeki...right-way-and-a-wrong-way-to-use-distrowatch/

And even a way to narrow choices down:
https://distrochooser.de/

After a year of trying it out, I've found most of my personal computing needs satisfied.

Just thought I'd share.

 

[DebonairDavid]

I've been using Linux Mint for about 13 years now, and what's great about it is it's very user-friendly, which is why it's THE recommended and go-to distro for new-to-Linux users. Outside of occasional problems with things like drivers, programs, or hardware, it's very secure and has very solid performance, and I'd recommend it to any average computer user who wants to have more privacy or control over their computing. However, I DON'T recommend the official Mint forums because of how strict the mods are about what kind of topics you can talk about.
https://linuxmint. com/
https://youtu .be/ZDzf7VGmYa0
https://youtu .be/KqklXzC03HA

 

[duderino84]

I've been using Linux Mint for about 13 years now, and what's great about it is it's very user-friendly, which is why it's THE recommended and go-to distro for new-to-Linux users. Outside of occasional problems with things like drivers, programs, or hardware, it's very secure and has very solid performance, and I'd recommend it to any average computer user who wants to have more privacy or control over their computing. However, I DON'T recommend the official Mint forums because of how strict the mods are about what kind of topics you can talk about.
https://linuxmint. com/
https://youtu .be/ZDzf7VGmYa0
https://youtu .be/KqklXzC03HA

Mint to me is OK; I don't like several different applications to perform updates, which Mint, in an effort to be friendly, last time I checked, had that configuration, unlike Gnome Software or Discover. I have a decade old processor and a 2021 era graphics card, so for my mix, I needed the "edge iso".

I started on Pop OS, and I've been bouncing between that and Zorin for about a year, but the thing is, I like KDE Plasma, so I plaster that on.

Fedora/Nobara are OK as well, but I'm thinking though that maybe if I move to rolling release distros I'll find better compatibility with everything.

With the whole "flavors" thing, I think DE wise, most people will like plasma or cinnamon. Not to say that XFCE or Mate aren't good either, but I think that generally people are looking to approximate themselves with "close to windows, but different enough the garbage doesn't come with it".

And that's also part of the Ubuntu debacle, because Microsoft owns Canonical.

 

[Bellylaughs]

Short term, heavily eyerolling and sighing and cursing as I'm forced through yet another Windows update.

Will NEVER convert to Apple.

I /am/ going to need my tech brothers to walk me through FOSS setup though bc tbh I'm easily the most "touch grass" person in my household and will more happily chop firewood outside in real life than be chained to a desk all day. I have a vague understanding of computers but I'm nowhere near double C.

 

[duderino84]

Short term, heavily eyerolling and sighing and cursing as I'm forced through yet another Windows update.

Will NEVER convert to Apple.

I /am/ going to need my tech brothers to walk me through FOSS setup though bc tbh I'm easily the most "touch grass" person in my household and will more happily chop firewood outside in real life than be chained to a desk all day. I have a vague understanding of computers but I'm nowhere near double C.

So, what you're going to end up doing to make that kind of change is essentially stepping in between the points where your computer turns on (the post, as in power on self test) and then loads an OS (for Microsoft this is the master boot record) to where you see Windows.

You need a thumb drive (32GB is plenty for a few images, or ISO files), an image to install on it, and then find your computer's BIOS/boot menu keys, hammer on one of the two (some computers can select boot media straight from the BIOS), and select the image. If you want to load one image at a time you can use Rufus or Etcher. If you want to load many images to try out as much as you can, try Ventoy.

Linux is a gentle learning curve. It's about exploring alternatives.

The way you approach Linux can be the Torvalds Way (you give an organization a kernel and they make it do everything you're likely to do) or the Stallman Way (similar principle but you believe all software should be free of nearly all claims of ownership).

 

[DebonairDavid]

As much as I want to see the desktop Linux user base keep growing, especially when the market share is at 3.81% (according to what Statcounter currently says), I know normies aren't going to make the switch any time soon. If anything, they'll switch to ChromeOS before Linux, which ideally is fine because it's Gentoo with a Google face on it, and Google has stated their programs will be compatible with Linux. However, because normies are often tech-illiterate, its hard to say if they'll stay on ChromeOS or jump ship for distros like Mint or Zorin. Although many people hated Vista back in the day (I was too young at the time to experience it first-hand and my dad and brother never used it either), they still have been running Windows since then because MacOS still struggled to compete with it and Linux had a way smaller user base in those days. I've heard Ubuntu could've been a serious competitor to Vista, but it failed because it doesn't work the same way as Windows. Now that a lot has changed since then, Windows might be finally be on it's deathbed after 11 becomes the new norm. To be fair, the developers can add patches to bugs, but they've been doing that for years. Being that it's Microsoft's best-selling product, it makes me wonder what's going to happen to Microsoft if 11 manages to kill the Windows brand.

 

[BlasterMaster]

See, this is why we all hate Microsoft. Because they do shit like THIS.

 

[DebonairDavid]

See, this is why we all have Microsoft. Because they do shit like THIS.

Not much has changed since Microsoft's anti-trust lawsuit of the early 2000's, and there's a number of reasons for it. For one, because Linux (and FOSS in general to a bigger extent) is so diverse in terms of choice, it's hard to market that to the masses. The second reason ties into marketing, while there has been some commercials for distros in the past, they've been few and far between, mainly because of budgeting issues and these organizations developing each distro not treating it like a commercial product. While there's nothing wrong with commercializing software in and of itself (you develop something, so you should be entitled to compensation for it), you obviously don't want corporatists dictating how software is developed and running it into the ground for the sake of greed. Then there's Microsoft, and Apple and Google to a lesser extent, having the money to create this vendor lock-ins with various businesses and other institutions. Lastly, Windows, like other proprietary software, is made for, marketed to, and used by people of average intelligence because they don't care how it works, they just want it to run, which is why Richard Stallman himself openly said in a TED Talks once "It's software for suckers!", and if you ask any Joe Normie about Linux or FOSS, they'll scoff at it and act like that's only a topic for nerds because they think you have to be a programmer just to know what either of those things are, even if its the basics.

 

[BlasterMaster]

I meant "this is why we all HATE Microsoft. Not have but Hate. Damn typos.

 

[duderino84]

As much as I want to see the desktop Linux user base keep growing, especially when the market share is at 3.81% (according to what Statcounter currently says), I know normies aren't going to make the switch any time soon. If anything, they'll switch to ChromeOS before Linux, which ideally is fine because it's Gentoo with a Google face on it, and Google has stated their programs will be compatible with Linux. However, because normies are often tech-illiterate, its hard to say if they'll stay on ChromeOS or jump ship for distros like Mint or Zorin. Although many people hated Vista back in the day (I was too young at the time to experience it first-hand and my dad and brother never used it either), they still have been running Windows since then because MacOS still struggled to compete with it and Linux had a way smaller user base in those days. I've heard Ubuntu could've been a serious competitor to Vista, but it failed because it doesn't work the same way as Windows. Now that a lot has changed since then, Windows might be finally be on it's deathbed after 11 becomes the new norm. To be fair, the developers can add patches to bugs, but they've been doing that for years. Being that it's Microsoft's best-selling product, it makes me wonder what's going to happen to Microsoft if 11 manages to kill the Windows brand.

Honestly, I think Chrome OS is a terrible idea. I remember back when I was in bands someone showed their little craptop (like super low power laptop) running ChromeOS, and I haven't cared to see if it had improved.

I tend to look at the optics of "Windows Alternatives" in about 4 factors.

1. The type of user: the open or closed nature of someone's mind will make it easy or hard to adapt to something slightly more manual than "just works".
2. Hardware configuration: how software runs is going to be a reflection of how hardware is setup to run. In Windows it's a bit more automatic than in Linux because the former is more fanatic of control panels, whereas the latter just believes in kernel level drivers.
3. The ranking on DistroWatch: distros there are mostly reliable, despite the fact that distributions like MX may inflate their page count, the one name we seem to hear more about is Linux Mint. But it's also a great way to learn what's out there.
4. The use case: a lot of users will say they need an OS that can do everything as they need, or some think that their use case seems to be "nothing specific"; getting people to be concrete about what they want to do on their machine makes the most sense to people finding what works best for them. Just my take.

If Google Chrome took over the world i think it would be worse than Skynet.

 

[DebonairDavid]

Honestly, I think Chrome OS is a terrible idea. I remember back when I was in bands someone showed their little craptop (like super low power laptop) running ChromeOS, and I haven't cared to see if it had improved.

I've never used ChromeOS (and don't plan to because I want nothing to do with Google), so I can't personally comment on it.

 

[duderino84]

I've never used ChromeOS (and don't plan to because I want nothing to do with Google), so I can't personally comment on it.

But you're indirectly recommending it to noobs? Devious.

 

[DebonairDavid]

But you're indirectly recommending it to noobs? Devious.

I'm not recommending it because the less people dependent on Big Tech, the better. However, I can't stop people from buying Chromebooks, so if it indirectly exposes them to the Linux ecosystem to the point where they're tired of Google's crap and they install a distro onto it, I welcome that.

 

[duderino84]

I'm not recommending it because the less people dependent on Big Tech, the better. However, I can't stop people from buying Chromebooks, so if it indirectly exposes them to the Linux ecosystem to the point where they're tired of Google's crap and they install a distro onto it, I welcome that.

This ideology is like trying to get people who play Fortnite to understand what FOSS is; there's usually very little concern over the actual subject matter vs the price, they only care if it can do _______ that's the hot and trendy thing.

Chromebooks just sound like waiting e-recycling.

 

[DebonairDavid]

This ideology is like trying to get people who play Fortnite to understand what FOSS is; there's usually very little concern over the actual subject matter vs the price, they only care if it can do _______ that's the hot and trendy thing.

Chromebooks just sound like waiting e-recycling.

Perhaps how the public can get more exposed to Mint is by having a computer science start up company form a Mint-only LUG through various park districts across the country where it teaches people who interested in it to learn how to use it, as well as how to program software and video games among other things. If anyone does have a Chromebook, although it doesn't really matter when you get it to run on any laptop these days, that could be their ticket out of Google's ecosystem.

 

[duderino84]

Perhaps how the public can get more exposed to Mint is by having a computer science start up company form a Mint-only LUG through various park districts across the country where it teaches people who interested in it to learn how to use it, as well as how to program software and video games among other things. If anyone does have a Chromebook, although it doesn't really matter when you get it to run on any laptop these days, that could be their ticket out of Google's ecosystem.

You mean like the Free Software Foundations Campaigns against Windows?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation_anti-Windows_campaigns

I think in general people just need some washing away of the instinct to compare the FOSS software vs Commercial software, much like GIMP is frequently confused with Photoshop just because they happen to edit photos.

 

[DebonairDavid]

You mean like the Free Software Foundations Campaigns against Windows?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation_anti-Windows_campaigns

I think in general people just need some washing away of the instinct to compare the FOSS software vs Commercial software, much like GIMP is frequently confused with Photoshop just because they happen to edit photos.

After looking at that link, no, that's not at all what I envisioned. I envisioned a scenario where people take a park district class, or a series of classes, to learn how to use Mint because they're done with Windows 10/11, MacOS, or ChromeOS, but still want to use the laptop hardware because they paid good money for it.

 

[DebonairDavid]

Now that it's beginning of April, I checked GStat this morning, and desktop Linux is 3.99% as of last month. Breaking the 4% threshold is something worth celebrating, so hopefully it will reach 4.5% by the end of the year.