Alternatives to Windows

I would imagine most eyes are going to be thinking "I'd like to use something other than windows and not mac!"

I still remember transitioning from dos 5 or 6 (can't remember - I think one had MS disk compression and the other didn't because they got sued by stacker or something). 

And I had one of the early windows version - 3.0 or something. It was so cumbersome. how do you find all of the files with a given extension at once, easy. Get a directory listing or switch to something a mile away, one command in dos. 

What about when you get a bunch of zp files and need to rename them all at once to .zip, easy in dos. 

Windows - nope. For those of us with disorganized minds, it wouldn't be more productive to go back to dos, but I do think it would be easier for me to keep track of doing individual tasks without distraction.

Ubuntu is on my list now, though. If work is always going to give me a windows PC and anything functional on my desktop PC would require renting, then I just don't need windows any longer for the home PC and the day that I buy anything that has to do with facebook or apple is never, so ubuntu it is. Also want to build a vacuum tube amp this fall and have about 6 oddball things I promised people I'd make. So for the time being, I need to puntu on ubuntu .

@DavidW,

Linux is basically a command-line system at its core. Desktop environments like GNOME or LXQt just add a graphical layer for convenience—you don’t actually need them to use Linux. Many servers and lightweight setups run entirely from the terminal. WC has over a million files. I couldn't imagine trying to manage them via a GUI. It would be a 24/7 job. But from a command line, with the right syntax, you can do almost anything on dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of files. Just press Enter and do something else while it does what you told it to do. Or put it in what is called a CRON job to be done at a specified recurring time.

Ubuntu is great for beginners because it’s user-friendly, has a large support community, and comes with most tools pre-installed. Being backed by Canonical, it often gets driver and hardware updates before other distros.

Linux Mint is another excellent choice, especially if you prefer a traditional desktop layout. It’s based on Ubuntu, so it inherits its stability and software compatibility, but comes with extra tweaks and pre-installed codecs that make it smooth and ready-to-use.

Lubuntu is a good option if you want something very lightweight. It uses the LXQt desktop, so it runs well even on older or low-spec machines, while still benefiting from Ubuntu’s software ecosystem and support. I keep coming back to it because I'm  a speed freak and don't want fancy visual elements that are supposed to impress me bogging things down. It's so fast that it sometimes feels like the window has popped up and is ready to use before I even finish clicking the mouse.

The process for installing most distros is the same. Download its .iso file. This needs to be imaged to a USB drive, but you cannot just copy it. A special program needs to do that which creates it in bootable image format. Two that work from Windows are Etcher and Rufus. I recommend Etcher--its' dead simple.

https://etcher.balena.io/

Install and run it like any other Windows executable. Point it to the .iso file you downloaded and your USB drive. Give it a few minutes to write the image. Then put it in the computer you want to install the Linux distro on and boot from it. The computer BIOS will be set to look from bootable devices in a particular order. You can either go into its BIOS and set the USB ports before whatever it is currently booting from, or press a certain key immediately after powering on. That key varies by computer:

https://www.woodcentral.com/-/peter/common-boot-menu-keys-and-bios-uefi-setup-keys/

When it boots from the USB most present the actual desktop of the distro. You can experiment a bit, but it will be slow because its reading from a USB and not a HDD or SSD.  Somewhere will be link to install. Most install programs are similar (because there are only a couple or programs used to create them) and most questions can be answered accepting the defaults by pressing Enter. The actual install often is often only minutes, compared to hours for Windows.

Lather, rinse, repeat

Having done it, most think, "Well, that was pretty darn easy!"  They then download other distros and repeat the process, trying to decide which one they like best. It's called "distro hopping" and it's a real thing, so beware!

My last exposure to anything unix was in 1999 as part of a combination class of CSE majors and math (me - definitely not CSE). 

We got to use Sun Sparcs and everything had to be done command line in unix, including sending emails to the professor if I recall (long time ago, not totally sure about that). 

I still don't know what the point of having us learn to use unix command line was for what was 80% modern math (think optimization and dynamic programming like UPS would use to determine routes - I say modern because it seems simpler and more practical than the more elegant stuff like calculus). 

the CSE majors hated the math and I didn't love the fact that  I could do the math side in about 10 minutes and then program it in 4 hours, but I guess that was the point. 

The final was take home and took 20 hours during finals week. Not long after that, the university banned take home finals. Probably someone in that class complained. I said to the professor, who was accessible during that period, "it's finals week, and I just figured if I woke up at 6am and went until midnight, I should be able to get this done in a day", and his response was "if you've done that, that would be a very good day". Rude!

If unix commands were only the same as dos, it would come back faster. I'm too old now to learn more than a couple of things new well and will live with the GUI to start. Sometime in the next month or two, I'll buy yet another older PC to use as the basis - it sounds like the lack of peripherals working on the older HP PC are still a problem, and I can just pull the drives out of that one and junk it. 

Are there any practical things to know about ubuntu, like a limitation on the number of cores it will use, etc. As in, so I don't waste my money finding an 8-16 core PC? I'm not worried about the older four core i7s having enough processing power, but more the implication of how old the main board and CPU are for someone to be dredging them up and slapping a lot of memory and SSD on them to make them look fresher than they are.

By the way, other than by force as mentioned above and seeing early linux. Neighbor in college was a rabid linux fan, and the type who came to college with 35 AP credits already and did something I've never seen anyone do. he shifted his daily schedule  an hour each day. If he got up today at 8am, tomorrow it was 9, the next day 10. If class fell during his shifted schedule, he skipped it and got away with it by doing enough. 

He was usually in my ear about switching to linux back then. 

And I could look it up, but I never checked to see what the difference is between linux and unix. Presumably the former is an open source operating system and the latter isn't, but there were already pretty good gui versions back then in the late 1990s, but support for hardware and gaming stuff was hit or miss. I was not a programmer, and other than taking three programming classes by obligation, have never been one. Applied mathematics vs. theoretical also taught me that I would not ever be going to graduate school to get a PhD in math, either. It gets too theoretical to me and there are too many rules.

DavidW wrote:

Are there any practical things to know about ubuntu, like a limitation on the number of cores it will use, etc. As in, so I don't waste my money finding an 8-16 core PC? I'm not worried about the older four core i7s having enough processing power, but more the implication of how old the main board and CPU are for someone to be dredging them up and slapping a lot of memory and SSD on them to make them look fresher than they are.

Standard Ubuntu kernel (generic) – supports all cores your CPU provides. Low-latency kernel – same core support, just tuned for faster response (e.g., for audio work). Server kernel – same again; slightly different defaults, but no core limit. Even dual-socket systems work fine, though for multi-CPU boards you’d use the server or generic kernel.

Ubuntu (64-bit) can use as much RAM as your hardware supports. The old 32-bit versions had a ~4 GB limit, but almost no one uses those anymore.

Ubuntu supports very large disks and file systems, depending on the file system used (e.g., ext4 supports up to 1 EB, way beyond practical use). By default, Ubuntu uses ext4, which is stable and fast. You can also choose ZFS, btrfs, or others for snapshots or advanced features.

Unlike Windows “Home” editions, which cap CPU sockets (not cores), Ubuntu will happily use all cores and threads on a CPU.

tl;dr - No need to worry about any of this. You'll be fine with a default install.

I'd plug a mouse and keyboard in the the laptop you mentioned and just try installing. Back up data on the drive if there may be anything of value. The make a USB as described and boot from it. If it's an HP, the key to press repeatedly upon powering on is probably F9 to bring up a boot menu.

From that point on, it's just answering prompts--usually by just pressing Enter to accept defaults and rebooting when it's finished.

If you like it, consider adding an SSD if it doesn't already have one. That makes SUCH a difference in making almost all computers more pleasurable to use--regardless of OS.

With you on that. The big pig of a laptop that I have that's 8 years old is a tweener. It's got 180 or 250gigs or something of SSD and then a 1TB platter drive. 

Just to get that boot speed, though - it's first world vs. third world. 

I'll take your advice, but in a "cloudy with a chance of dell or lenovo" as it looks like dell and lenovo have better hardware support in ubuntu because they actually sell to environments where it's the workplace OS. 

But I'll also check the ubuntu page for compatibility to my newest HP (all SSD, 12 cores, etc)  as there's no great reason it needs to be windows-based other than running some microscope software. Wouldn't be surprised if there's a linux version of the software.

@DavidW,

>It's got 180 or 250gigs or something of SSD and then a 1TB platter drive. 

When installing, watch carefully where it sets up the drive for installing. It will have a drop-down list of the two drives you mentioned. Be sure the SSD is selected for install, leave the other untouched. You want the boot and OS installed on the SSD, that's what makes it feel fast. The other can be accessed from within Linux as a separate drive for storing data, backups, etc.

That "pig" of a laptop sounds like a decent desktop computer. No law a desktop computer has to look like a desktop computer. Make a fancy wooden enclosure for it and post it!

I use the word pig because of the size. Yes on the SSD boot - that PC is sort of a tweener in age where you could get SSDs cheap, but not big ones, so they do the boot on the SSD and the "slower" storage on the HDD. the most recent one has, I think, 2tb of SSD. 

the early versions of a big one like I have a fondness for offered a big screen, but they also relieved manufacturers of using the most slim and low power consumption stuff that at that time cost a good bit more per flop and gig than a combination of things. I believe the first one of these I got was around 2006 or 2007, and I always remember having more of them than I've had. I think it's only three plus one my wife broke. They were (and still usually are) really cheap compared to slimmest and fastest combination. 

And I think HP actually may have marketed them as "desktop in a laptop" which is probably accurate as long as you compare them to low end business laptops. I think they also used the stupid term "media PC". 

The drawback to them other than weight is that they don't fit in some work bags. 

Work now offering a laptop for the last 8 or 10 years instead of a desktop to VPN into cuts the hours on the home PC so my 6 year expectation based on hours of runtime and internal filth is off. the last one slowed to a crawl at 6 years old, the middle one with the ssd hdd combo at 8 years old only has issues due to the peripherals but has more than TB of space and 16 gigs of ram. they are a bigger pain in the ass to take apart and fix than something that big should be, but I'm sure there's cost savings in making them that way, and not just doing that with the really little ones.

You shouldn't have to take it apart to test Linux on it. Re running slower over time, when you get it running with Linux, I'll tell you how to test the thermal temps of the processor and if it is throttling from being too hot. The CPU and GPU will usually have a heat sink on them with thermal paste between them. The thermal paste degrades over time and may need to be removed and reapplied. An indication of this is seeming slower and hearing the fan run faster and more often than usual.

Actually, what I was thinking about in terms of taking it apart is replacing the keyboard and touchpad, but I haven't taken the pig apart in a while, and the last time was just to see if it had two platter disc holes like the prior model does so i could copy the info off of the prior PC's disk. Unfortunately no. 

that does give a hint on something useful about the large laptop size though, and another plus on the original. the machine came with one platter drive and could house two, so not seeing the SSDs become affordable as quickly as they did, I figured buy one, and when it croaks, the next HDD will be multiples larger, so there won't be an issue with data storage and I can feed back other important files for redundancy onto the old disk, take it out and store it. Let's call the three PCs Pig 1, Pig2 and Slim Piggins. 

Slim is the new one with no DVD drives, etc, and all SSD. pig 2 is the machine 8 years old (small SSD for boot then big slow storage), and only this year did I dump off the bones of pig 1 at a greencycle offering at work after removing the disks, but I still have the disk and still will (or maybe not) get some media off of pig 1. The fact that modernity happens foiled my plan to just keep dumping the old harddrive in the open bay of the new one. 

And I suppose when pig2 gives up at some point in the future, the last operating DVD/CD PC drive here will be gone. Which sounds like no big deal, but twice in the last year due to some squabbles, an office gave us records on a burned CD instead of sending them to another healthcare provider. it's becoming a rare capability now to have a PC that will read CDs let alone sketchy CDrs.

You can usually find out what drive slots, usb port speeds, etc. by Googling the make and model and getting the manual(s), so no need to take apart.

If your machine only has one slot, like the one I'm using now, you can put your HD into a USB enclosure and access it from the computer via USB. Be sure to get a USB 3 enclosure, not USB 2; the speed is much faster than USB 2. For a HD, if it is the typical non-laptop ones, it requires an enclosure for 3.5" drives and a power supply which is typically included with the enclosure. Smaller 2.5" laptop drives and SSDs only need the power supplied by the USB port.

If you don't have a machine with a CD/DVD drive, you can get an external USB drive at a very reasonable cost. I have one but it is rarely used these days.

If you like fooling around a little (electronically speaking) you can get one of these which allows you to convert an existing internal drive to USB for temporary use. I have used one with my CD/DVD drives.
Hannord SATA to USB Adapter USB 3.0 to 2.5" 3.5" SATA III Hard Drive Adapter - External Transfer Cable for SSD/HDD Support UASP, with 12V 2A Power Adapter - Newegg.com
The above is just an example, there are lots of others. If you only want to access the old HD not too often, you can use this device instead of an enclosure. Note that it is for SATA drives (match the connector shown), not the old IDE drives which use a different connector.

I support Bill's suggestion of using external USB cases for old hard drives. The little 2.5" ones are cheap. I had a slim line Lenovo that the hinges disintegrated on, and I put the drive in an external case rather than try to transfer all the files I may need to my new laptop. In fact, I have most of my really old 3.5" drives in cases that required an external power unit. I bought them reasonably cheap on Ebay used.

Thanks, gentlemen - I'll look for them. I bought a "universal HDD" device that is a dock for harddrives and will supposedly allow transfer, but it was quite some time ago and I have never gotten it to work with any drives, and shelved the idea. 

I'll try a simple enclosure. the drives are all 2.5 drives. Not sure, but I haven't had a PC with a 3.5 drive since 2006 or 2007, and I don't think I kept the drives.

@DavidW,

You mentioned the laptop has both an SSD and HDD. Windows is probably installed on the SSD. Just install Linux on the SSD. It will recognize the HDD which can then be accessed for whatever is on it, or repartitioned, reformatted etc.

You're good to go right now without doing anything IMO.  I wouldn't spend any money on it until after Linux is installed and working. It may find other costly issues that would deem it best just parting out. Or not.

First step is just to install Linux and find out.

I mostly use Lubuntu as a "daily driver," so if you install that, I may be able to help more.

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/questing/release/lubuntu-25.10-desktop-amd64.iso

Actually, the laptop with the two drives, definitely windows and everything system related plus a bunch more is on the 250gb SSD. the second drive pretty much just has videos on it. 

Recall this is the laptop that needs USB mouse and keyboard to work, though - did you mention there could be a hiccup there with ubuntu?

Of course, there is plenty of space on the slow storage drive to move anything on the SSD that's not system to that drive ahead of time. 

preferences on linux version? I watched a video last night, something I rarely do before experimenting, and see there are a lot of good options (mint, ubuntu, etc). 

Interestingly, the guy doing the video mentioned that win 11 in a dual boot system has a habit of applying an update and wiping out the linux boot entirely claiming it "doesn't recognize it", so I will be moving that PC to linux only. 

I now fully understand MS's insistence on the T whatever chip or module that is touted as a security feature. It's plain and simple, a move to get a unique and definitive device ID thus individual ID on all data whether a user wants the data to be collected or not. I wouldn't be surprised if data file uniformity by a more definitive ID increases the amount of money MS and affiliates can sell data for by a huge percentage, maybe double. 

Onedrive and backup are doing nothing on my new PC - though the prompts and e-begging to have it turned on are fairly regular by the system. I wonder how long it will be before the system makes it much more difficult to opt out of being trapped in the cloud.

>Recall this is the laptop that needs USB mouse and keyboard to work, though - did you mention there could be a hiccup there with ubuntu?

Nah, the KB is recognized by the BIOS before any OS kernel loads. You should be fine.

>It's plain and simple, a move to get a unique and definitive device ID thus individual ID on all data whether a user wants the data to be collected or not.

Yep, an ID assigned by [drum roll] Microsoft.

Linux has a much stronger file permission system than Windows and won't let anything write to critical files unless they have "root" permission which more or less negates the need for a special TPM chip signed by Microsoft. Malware cannot write to anything that will affect booting unless it has the root password. And the only way to get the root password is to have the root password.

Added later 1 h 44 min 02 s:

DavidW wrote:

Interestingly, the guy doing the video mentioned that win 11 in a dual boot system has a habit of applying an update and wiping out the linux boot entirely claiming it "doesn't recognize it", so I will be moving that PC to linux only. 

Yup. I'm not a fan of dual booting. It often causes issues. Best to just dedicate machines to one OS. If you must use Windows for something, put it on a separate machine. There are options to run Windows in a virtual machine under Linux, but that's another subject and best left until after one understands things a bit more. 

Keep in mind that Linux installs in minutes, not hours like Windows. It's easy--and sort of fun---to experiment with different flavors for those who like that sort of thing. That would be me; I like experimenting, testing, optimizing, etc.

As do I (like experimenting)....I'll transfer the files from my old PC to my new one this weekend and install linux mint. 

If it works well, I'm fast approaching the new big fat HP (well, big thin now) maybe going to linux. Traveled for most of the weekend and returned to a big popup doing whatever it could to steer me to back up with onedrive, which I have opted out of about five times now. Windows pretending to be helpful in what's really an attempt to get all of your data in the cloud and then collect storage fees...f them. there is basically nothing on that PC but pictures, and I don't have a great deal of interest in opening it up to get past ever changing formats of "use one-drive and see how hard it is to figure out which button is "opt out"" The latest version of that popup makes it appear that you are in the middle of something and you're not opting out, you have to "cancel". One would think the word cancel has to do with something already going.

Dual booting post Windows 7 always struck me as too much of a hassle so when I got a refurbished machine I would just wipe it clean and install linux.

I actually liked Windows 7 ok.  It was the only version I had seen that defaulted new user accounts to limited ones rather than admin.  That's a big deal, and finally they had made the smart move!  No idea if they kept it up, I have hardly touched a Windows machine since then.  The couple we have around work I leave to the younger crowd to figure out, they seem to have a better intuition for it (I feel like my dad in the 1980's, swearing at the VCR he couldn't program!).

The one time my ex's Windows 7 machine picked up some malware, I was able to find it and get rid of it via the admin account using just the time stamp.  Fortunately we knew right about when it happened - within 10-20 minutes so close enough.  I also had a "spare" user login on that machine so if she had that trouble again while I was doing a work week in the next state she could just switch and use the spare for day to day stuff.

Windows 7 pro (or if there wasn't a different version, whatever was the follow on after XP pro) was an excellent version. Dad got a PC with 8 on it - it was straight up garbage, presumably made on the idea that everyone would migrate to a windows version on phone, tablet and computer and they would look the same. 

10 was decent, still is. 

I keep misstating the older HP machine that I have as needing USB to boot - what I need is bluetooth, actually. it also has four USB ports, but two are dead and one isn't, so i'll leave it as it is. There's not enough USB ports on it for me to get mouse (both keyboard and touchpad are kaput!!) and keyboard and USB thumb drive boot, so I'm just going to put it aside after harvesting files off of it. it also has office pro on it with a supposed lifetime membership, but i'm fairly sure that someone did something to pirate the office pro version on it as it's a refurb machine. 

there are a lot of PCs on ebay that aren't expensive as long as one doesn't need the case to be perfect. a 32gb ram older four core i7 machine (10k score or higher on cpu mark, though, so not that far off of the lower end 8 to 12 core chips) from dell is $300 or less with a half gig SSD. At least of refurb PCs. Less if you're willing to buy true used. tons of configurable option refurb sellers that cost 60% more - I can't figure that angle out. Old 4 core I5 or I7 dell laptops for $475 to $500 - I don't get it, but maybe they only offer the cosmetically perfect ones. 

(just looked at the listing I bought from - the seller is "the waste commission of Scott County". hah!  presumably old PCs discarded for "green" recycling. Nothing greener than continuing to use. will install mint this weekend if the PC arrives. Looking forward to it. limitations at work on attaching peripherals like USB scanners forces me to leave the new big one in windows for now. I can't attach a usb scanner, but I can attach it to my PC, scan, and then send the file bluetooth).

Added later 6 h 03 min 44 s:

Peter, I'm hurt that you didn't insult me for getting a PC with 32 gigs of ram to run mint. 

CPU is a 6 core CPU, too. Latest and greatest as of like 2018. 

Opted to get dell instead of cheapest option (always HP or acer or something and used) due to fear of what peripherals on a 6 year old HP would be like if they weren't already kaput. And, based on comments on reddit that dell and lenovo are better supported across all devices and drivers, etc on linux than are the cheapie brands since they serve office environments that are linux based.

Added later 57 min 17 s:

Yet another pop up message in the middle of startup telling me that I could lose all of my passwords and data if I don't enable backup through onedrive. 

But I just went to the effort to find out if those notifications can be disabled (they can!), as can all of the default notifications to "improve your experience", with one of those being the constant one-drive badgering. 

Still looking forward to mint.

If you like Arch-based distros (maybe because you like rolling releases), check this out:
https://cachyos.org/

Choose the KDE Plasma deskop. 

Easy install (unlike pure Arch), and everything was recognized and worked (e.g., printers, Bluetooth, wi-fi). The UI is similar to Win7 and very fast. Using it now, and impressed so far.

arch would be a distro over mint? or a different base version?

I checked briefly this morning, and everything I use, including the microscope camera software, has linux-based software. there's no reason that my second PC (aside from the first one that now apparently has to perform tasks for my day job as the managed desktop/system security blocks)....anyway, I have absolutely no reason to stick with windows. Even the consumer printer I have, that's now unsupported, has linux deb and rpm driver versions.

@DavidW,

A different base distribution based on Arch instead of Ubuntu or Debian which Mint Linux is based.

I know this is probably confusing to most reading this, so maybe I should shut up.

Arch is apparently not first time friendly, right? Base arch, that is. 

I'm curious on the first install and will probably use mint, but we'll see how long it lasts.

@DavidW,

>Arch is apparently not first time friendly, right? Base arch, that is. 

Yeah. Arch is nice and has some advantages (and disadvantages), but it doesn't have a user-friendly install. It's all done from a terminal command-line by following detailed instructions, but those instructions will contain lots of terminology unfamiliar to those trying to follow them. This is by design. It enables fine-tuning the install to the particular hardware and enables Arch users to passive aggressively claim intellectual superiority in computer conversations by causally commenting, "I use Arch BTW."  LOL

But all is not lost! There are Arch-based distros that put lipstick on that complicated command-line pig -- and suddenly that pig becomes beautiful! It boots from the USB into a nice graphical install walking you through the whole process, with prompts where just pressing Enter for the default value is often the correct choice. After the install is complete, it will ask you to reboot. If all went OK, it will boot in mere seconds, and you find yourself running Linux proper from your SSD in whatever flavor you have chosen. No user account needed or asked for to use YOUR computer. No telemetry sending data and screenshots from YOUR computer back to the mothership. 

And if you don't like the flavor, try another one. You're now a kid in a candy store where all the candy is free!

You can now leave the masses of knuckle-dragging Neanderthal Microsoft and Apple users behind and enjoy true FREEDOM!