Alternatives to Windows

When I installed mint, I was going to do it no matter what. But win11 prevented balena from etching the ISO on a USB. 

the other thing I think people will hesitate on is understanding that they could install the OS on a peripheral drive to try it out. Everyone wants "point me to a link and then ask my permission to install, and then do everything else the way I want but without me having to specify what that is". 

I'll equate it to sourdough from a wild starter (which I don't do because I'm too lazy). The first loaf of bread is the hardest. After that, it's not very difficult. 

That bit for most people of creating an ISO, and considering wiping out their old PC (no need, super stuff out there for $250 used, and capable for $150), and working through the bios, which most people have probably never done. Not most of us, but most people out in general holding. that's the hold up. 

Once one PC has linux on it, it's like the sour dough starter. It took longer to download the 6 gig ubuntu ISO, and then burning it on mint to the USB was nothing. I turned around to do something for a fraction of a minute and it was done. 

I'm forcing son to do all of the changes to the PC now that he wants, and he just realized this morning that he could use a workaround to get roblox on linux instead of playing it on his tablet, his 3d printer is set up, and since the mrs. PC is old (7200 something generation core i5, maybe?), the cheapie PC son is working on is not exactly fast by now standards, but it's 12 core. It renders his 3d files about 20 times faster, despite cpu mark being about 5 times faster than the Mrs. old PC. 

And he's learning about heat now, and creating a riser for his laptop and realizing there are things you can do where you choose what's on your device and how it works, and you're not dodging a bunch of embedded bullshit that takes eons to track down over time to try to disable everything. 

Anyway, yes - just understanding the ISO thing, having to make a decision if you'll learn to run it on a thumb or external drive to try it vs. just wiping out windows, learning to find a good PC used for cheap (wife's $343 PC is found in identical shape "official refurbished" through target, best buy, etc, $700-$832 depending on retailer, not sure what the PC I gave son would be, but there are numerous $150-$200 offerings that would be fine and probably for half a decade of use). 

now that we have "the starter", if someone else local wanted to use linux, I'd burn the iso for them if they only have win11 and can't do it. 

in the back of my mind is the erosion of what windows was in the XP through even 7 pro days, and you could manage to have it not interfering too much. it's trash now, and most people don't want to be badgered by popups, distracting applets or whatever that show up trying to get you to go to the MSN news site, etc. We've gotten used to it because it happens a little at a time, and getting away from it to a PC that only does what you want, and if you want something else, you add it, not leave it after deselecting 200 other things and dodging updates that seek permission to badger you again or gather your data. 

And the side benefit that my son, who hates windows so much (natural hate, I never said anything about it) and would default to using a tablet - he's actually doing something other than scrolling or working through android apps.

David Weaver wrote:

The last time I had any significant time on a one button mouse was probably 1996 or so. Mac at the time was in trouble as the hardware was supposedly OK, but the macs did nothing but freeze in the labs at penn state. There was always a line to the entrance for the PCs and I thought mac would go broke soon. They were probably close to it. 

But they're not for me for a myriad of reasons. 

Son is upstairs with the ubuntu PC, has taken it on as his own (which is fine, I have another one coming and I hate keyboards without the number keypad off to the right). He's used linux zero times in his life, spends most of his time on a tablet, and within two hours, has configured ubuntu to look the way he wants it to. Has tracked down his slicer software, added a couple of other peripheral things he likes and has endured no popups or data snarfing or endless redirecting news popups to MSN or begging over onedrive. 

he's 12. 

I think we will probably be switching the wife's PC to either mint or ubuntu, too. She'll never know the difference. 

We have a managed desktop at work on our work PCs, though, as do most, so my ability to do anything but take the standard laptop and use it however it is set up...well, anything else has a chance of zero percent attached to it.

Mac had a well deserved renaissance starting around 2002 with the introduction of OSX which was a customization of BSD - the main linux alternative in porting Unix style systems to PC's.  OSX was basically a 'nix environment with a good window manager and like with linux, the ability to do everything from software development in a bare bones shell environment to standard office style tasks.  And because Apple was a name, there was a lot of third party software written for it that you could buy.  The bigger linux distros at the time were about as functional as that once up and running, but it could be kind of crunchy to get them up and running.  Mac's advantage was that they were selling a limited number of hardware environments, making the systems overall less difficult to set up and use - linux's Achilles heel at the time was that there were so many different machines to install it on that every installation needed a bit of extra work. 

OSX was really popular immediately with academics in the sciences, and remains so now in spite of Apple's waning support for these kinds of uses.  If those same people were in grad school now, I bet they would be gravitating more to linux than Mac.

The last straw for me was when I had to troubleshoot some old serial stuff this year and found that Mac OS no longer natively supported telnet.  Linux still does.  If I have to install something that basic, useful, and light of footprint, to hell with their stupid system.  One day I expect they will eliminate support for ssh and other command line tools, then get rid of their terminal program entirely.  I'm tempted to do the work to get the employer's VPN running on my linux machine and give them the stupid macbook back!

Your son is off to a good start!  No one who can think and problem solve on their own is going to have much to fear from AI.

OSx rang a bell to me until I realized the offering in the bookstore that wasn't windows or mac was actually OS/2. That was marketed as a good alternative while we were going through growing pains with win95 and waiting for MS plus to come out, and then finally having someone in the dorms later share a beta of win 98 that was a good while yet before retail release and so much better than win 95/plus that it was silly. At least as far as coming back to the room and not finding BSOD or having instantaneous BSOD at any point. 

Reminds me of the check engine light on the two volkswagens I had. they showed up at random, and most of the time represented some kind of degredation that would empty the pocket. 

Most of us in the dorm who were not programmers or in the core science majors and working on unix didn't have the stomach to move away from windows, if for no other reason, because the shared software way back then, as far as games, was enormous, and nothing else really supported it in volume, or all of the controllers and such. Tried Win NT3.51, then a pre-release of NT4. Very stable, but too many things we had as far as PCI cards and controllers for games didn't work in it and were completely unsupported. 

And then the work world wrung all of that fun out in a hurry. I'm inclined to go read if OS/2 got any traction. That was still when IBM still had a little bit of remaining cache on the personal computer market. I guess they really did remain for quite a while with the thinkpads until selling the brand to whoever operates lenovo. 

I'd bet there are still PS/2 mice and keyboards floating around that but for the connectors, are perfect in function.

(wow....upon looking that up, completely forgot about the PowerPC design stuff, too).

I'd totally forgotten about OS/2....
Never knew about PowerPC, but I was mostly doing field work in Mexico around that time so I wasn't paying much attention to computer stuff.

If you want to get really esoteric, I still have an embedded system at work that runs FORTH.  We may replace it with a modern controller one day, if there's budget for that kind of project.  Only in the last couple years did we get staff capable of doing the work.

What made me think of that is I recently was told that they were still maintaining it as a system environment - sure enough FORTH Inc has a current and modern looking website.  I'll give it one thing - that system we have is stable.  I have occasional trouble with peripheral parts of it, but never the computer boards.  Same was true with old VME systems we had running VxWorks on 88000 Motorola processors.   The problems we had with those were with the code and how people used it.  The hardware was very stable stuff.

... wrote:

I'd bet there are still PS/2 mice and keyboards floating around that but for the connectors, are perfect in function....

Very recently built 3 new PCs, two with an ASUS MB and other with a Gigabyte. Both have PS/2 connector for either a keyboard or mouse and I'm still using PS/2 keyboards or mice.

Peter Martin wrote:

David Weaver wrote:

OSx rang a bell to me until I realized the offering in the bookstore that wasn't windows or mac was actually OS/2.

I used OS/2 Warp to run a multi-line BBS in the 90s before the Internet was opened up to the public. It was still used in some ATMs (Diebold) up until a few years ago and is still used in old industrial equipment that doesn't connect to the Internet. A search shows someone is still maintaining it:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

I think "os/2 warp" was actually what was written on the box. When win 95 plus came out and then 98, it probably killed much hope for other os's. And NT 3.51 and 4 on the lab/network side, I guess, where Unix wasn't involved.  I can't remember, but I think when win 98 came out, the beta was so good that I just continued to use it. Either that, or bought an update disk off of ebay back in the day when there were actually bargains on there (albeit, all of my recent PCs have come from there - at a certain level where the cool people no longer want a system, it's great for that as long as you can differentiate one seller's $500 offering from another $250 offering and realize the $500 is just either an idiot who doesn't care about slow sales, or it's a relister).

Added later 05 min 01 s:

John in NM wrote:

aining it as a system environment - sure enough FORTH Inc has a current and modern looking website.  I'll give it one thing - that system we have is stable.  I have occasional trouble with peripheral parts of it, but never the computer boards.  Same was true with old VME systems we had running VxWorks on 88000 Motorola processors.   The problems we had with those were with the code and how people used it.  The hardware was very stable stuff.

The prior company I worked for wrote their own financial modeling software. But the department was a little glorified, let's say. For a group with 2000 employees in my trade worldwide, the software and tools department was 60 people, and they had gotten stale and were not responsive. 

The actual core of the program came from two guys who worked for a competitor and wrote what was probably command line (but maybe menu based by the early 80s? it was still dos menu based in 2000). These companies are all run by greedy and foolish people. Smart, but too greedy for their own good. The first company these guys wrote a great modeling system for decided once they'd written it, it was a waste of money to have them if they were credentialed and could bill more time. They should've allowed them to keep developing tools. But they basically come to the company I work for and scratch wrote the same thing over a year or year and a half in double precision fortran, and even once we got a windows based front end with a lot more menu items and maybe a little more user friendly, the core  (kernel?) of the program, which was really just brute force as far as the math goes, was unchanged. 

The oldest version was by far the most stable.

Added later 1 d 22 h 18 min 53 s:

add on comment here - I got a slightly less good shape dell 7540 to go along with the one I have running mint. I want to run two, not switch between them, and we're still treading in the $225 shipped territory here for a PC that has less wear than most of the PCs i've had mid-life. 

Son us going to town on ubuntu, but he does things that are pretty common for kids outside of learning at first to find software that wasn't in the software library and follow the prompts in command line regarding what he didn't have but needed to install (the prompts literally gave you the command line to cut and paste). 

I find ubuntu a little lacking, but mostly because the interface is more trim and the library is sparse. I'm aware that it's not the only way to get software and the command line library is much bigger than the visual library (at least i gather that). 

Going to give kubuntu a shot on the second PC now before doing much more on ubuntu, and then decide which. (for anyone not seeing an explanation of both - kubuntu is more trim in the background, which I don't really need, but more flexibility to set up the desktop the way I want to. Not at all a necessary change from ubuntu, though - just trying it because I can. If it seems like "mint v2", then I'll think about perhaps using one of the suddenly plentiful SSDs here for each. 

nice thing about the 7540s is there are three ssd slots and apparently room for a 2.5SATA type if you have the small battery (I do in at least one of the two). Not obvious to me where the 2.5SATA ssd would connect, but something for another time. Maybe there's a cable that patches to the adjacent nVME slot. 

Love mint on the first PC - it's not going anywhere. I don't wish mint was windows, i wish windows was mint.

forgot that there is now a merge or not merge with previous post, though I don't know if that's only available because I'm using a moderator login. 

At any rate, an attempt to use an old SSD that's a format that I have no clue what (recovered from wife's computer after a water spill boat anchored the whole thing). Surprisingly, copying the data off of it to another new SSD first was agonizingly slow. I learned today that SSDs don't retain a lot of energy and work quickly if an area of the disk isn't used for a while. 

at any rate, the dell 7540 generation doesn't recognize the old SSD. it fits in an M.2 slot with the same screw cutout at the end, but the slot has two gaps in it instead of one. So it's not sata, not NVME, I have no clue what it is, and it can be put to permanent rest. 

Result - I overwrote ubuntu now with kubuntu. 

Which leads to this post - something you will never see in windows. 

At idle, with 16 gigs of ram (15.4 available) in the second one of these 7540s, the system is using 1.7 gigs of ram, and 0.7-1.1% of the CPU. 

My work PC with windows would not be a relevant comparison for memory use because it's got a boatload of monitoring and cloud-related stuff on it. 

I could live with any of the three. kubuntu is sort of like mint, a little less streamlined and plain than ubuntu, but with more options to change things than ubuntu, and I understand, a different software manager in the background that's a lot lighter in resources. Gnome or something in ubuntu, and I've forgotten...KDE or something? in kubuntu. 

it's time to start learning more terminal command stuff, as you can do very little of it in mint since everything is setup with menus. There's less of that in u/ku buntus. Those are not by any means plain, but what you can just flip through a menu and go fetch is definitely lower in volume. 

Chance of return to windows for tasks of any type is zero at this point, and i've got a turd on my hands as far as the big HP PC that I have. I see people hate the 7540 dell precision if they are regular users because it's bulky, but it's not as heavy as the large but flat HP 17t PC. Son loves that one because it has a giant touch screen, but I stuck with those with windows due to the large number of drive bays and the fact that the screen is big enough to do a couple of tasks on it. Covid hit, I got a double monitor setting at my desk, and none of that mattered. Nobody really wants those big hog laptops now - they were referred to as "desktop replacement laptops" which is an antiquated thought.

David Weaver wrote:

...
at any rate, the dell 7540 generation doesn't recognize the old SSD. it fits in an M.2 slot with the same screw cutout at the end, but the slot has two gaps in it instead of one. So it's not sata, not NVME, I have no clue what it is, and it can be put to permanent rest. 
...

If it has 2 gaps in the edge connector end it is a M.2 format card with a SATA rather NVME interface which makes it slower and it must be installed in a M.2 SATA, not NVME, slot. However, you can purchase an inexpensive adapter so you can use a regular SATA port with it.

NVMe vs. SATA: Storage Comparison & Differences

Bill Howatt wrote:

David Weaver wrote:

...
at any rate, the dell 7540 generation doesn't recognize the old SSD. it fits in an M.2 slot with the same screw cutout at the end, but the slot has two gaps in it instead of one. So it's not sata, not NVME, I have no clue what it is, and it can be put to permanent rest. 
...

If it has 2 gaps in the edge connector end it is a M.2 format card with a SATA rather NVME interface which makes it slower and it must be installed in a M.2 SATA, not NVME, slot. However, you can purchase an inexpensive adapter so you can use a regular SATA port with it.

Fortunately, in this case, the laptops I have (the two i'm using) will use both types. 

The really old SSD that I have, I'll have to remove to look at it. It says nothing on it (doesn't even say SATA).

Added later 17 h 48 min 44 s:

the next time I power down the kubuntu laptop that's up and running, I'll pull out my oddball 180 gig SSD and see what it is. I may just be remembering that it's odd looking only to find out that it matches one of the sata or nvme pictures. 

Kubuntu, by the way - I like it. Minty in some respects. The file manager and software distribution functionality reminds me a lot of mint. 

Son is on ubuntu, which is more plain and simple compared to kubuntu, but kubuntu used as stock for the most part isn't like a glitchy weird pile of stuff, it's just got features added a lot like mint does, to make the menu based experience more like windows. 

I don't know if the people who use kubuntu would take that as an insult, but I think it's a plus for a lot of people as the reality is, a lot of people who are flying to linux right now are windows refugees. I find reddit a lot like youtube. If you are already versed in something, the topical areas are a pain in the ass. I try to get some interest in the hand tool side and post once in a while, but it is just too much "paul sellers and james wright and rex say this", no substantive discussion - like sitting around in a room full of people who just started or who willfully don't explore anything. But it's late stage, too - I get that. The traffic has probably gone to insta, substacks, discords, whatever else cool people do. 

At any rate, that level of discussion  on the linux threads, the ubuntus, kubuntus, mints, etc, is more apt, and there are long time developers present (there are no professional hand tool users in the ht woodworking sub), with the group being very tolerant of beginners. 

A lot of the stuff I'm looking at is ubuntu or offshoots (fedora, ubuntu itself, kubuntu, mint.... there an endless list). It makes me wonder what some of the other linux types are like - debian or not. 

I'm aware even from people who are messing with ubuntu and kubuntu, etc, that you can create instability problems if you try to customize too much. And at the same time, some of the more difficult but lower volume distros don't have the same level of hardware support that ubuntu's base version and mint do. 

subjectively, kubuntu is slightly more buggy than ubuntu or mint. I haven't had a single odd thing occur on either ubuntu or mint. Kubuntu can pause for a second now and again, but that could jsut be me. 

Last thought for now. I have a cheap bone, but it's selective. I could buy $800 of japanese white steel and then sit in my home office and try to figure out how to get 20 more watts of consumption down from all of the gadgets. But when buying all of these laptops, it's apparent that there is a penalty for consumption, so to speak. My two 7540s have intel's i7-9850H. The one cpumarked in windows at 13k, which is still in line with the lower end energy saving CPUs now. My 1260P HP machine CPUmarked at 20.5k. the two 1265u laptops that I bought for son and wife are a good bit newer than the 9850H in generations, and are power savers, but they CPU mark at the same level as the 9850. 

what's the point? I thought maybe the 7540 precisions would draw multiples of what I would prefer for electricity, but the kubuntu machine is sitting behind me at the moment with the screen on playing internet radio and drawing 12 watts. I can live with that. Easily. The cpu mark page provides TDP (thermal power under load) and has the 9850H cpu alone at 35-45 watts. That must be all out consumption. I wasn't hoping to consume 60 or 70 watts, but fortunately for typical use, that's misleading. 

Running a have size YT video window on freetube bumps it up a couple of watts, but that's about it. 

I think my last CRT monitor drew about 100, and the tower had a 250 watt power source. No clue what it drew - probably a small fraction of that, but this is long ago talk - Intel celeron 300 clocked to 450 talk. the AMD chip that I had in the case before it was a 233mhz chip and unstable with only an aluminum heat sink.

Added later 43 s:

one separate thought, too. SATA SSDs would not be a real hindrance to me. I still have a pair of standalone external drives, and I don't play games or do much heavy data work at this point where transfer is anything more than archiving or backup. 

the second dell 7540 I bought was cheaper, the case isn't in as good of shape, the GPU is less good (don't care), the ram is 16 instead of 32, and the seller is less than ethical, vastly overstating the condition of the battery, but I will buy a generic for now. For "NOS" dell batteries, I don't trust that most of the listings are anything more than counterfeits. 

I figured if I thought i needed more ram, I'd just find dimms, but two things are more expensive than I thought they'd be. three or five year ago dimms and three or five year ago SSD drives that are not heavily used. 

I would've guessed 32 gigs of ddr4 would be $50 by now and a TB M2 drive that's several years old about the same. Not the case, and I wonder if data centers are driving up the price of ram on the used market by pushing up the price of new memory.

Thanks, Peter. What you says is much of what I gleaned from the discussions. I expected a lot of developers to lean toward arch, but there seems to be more preference for ubuntu (plain old), but lots of fans of fedora, and some of kubuntu. 

Son's PC with ubuntu, given the resource use of gnome, newer machines will be pretty indifferent about something like that. The simplicity makes it clear that it would be a good environment for an office of people who aren't tied to microsoft products. like developers. I noticed the app library is smaller and tighter, as you say. 
 
The app libraries in mint and kubuntu are large, and the systems (and maybe ubuntu itself is the same - I told my son to figure out how to find his 3d printer software and install it, so I actually have no idea what he did, other than letting him know that I want to know if he's tracking down other apps that are not in the app library, because I don't want him to paperweight his machine by accident with something intentionally corrupt). 

There are a couple of things i use on mint, but inconsequential, like gucview that I have to look further at as kubuntu won't eat the install and use it as it is without doing something extra. Cheese doesn't work well on mint with a hand scope attached - it either doesn't find it or freezes). Yesterday, I put a different handscope in with kubuntu on the other PC and cheese found it right away, and then crashed. A harmless crash, though. I reopened it and it functioned OK. The ratings for it in the kubuntu library suggest that the preference for it is lukewarm at best. 

Since it didn't find the scope I had in mint, I didn't use it there and went to gucview. 

You are right about video project creating - it's an endless resource sucker and the compiling and writing would benefit from more throughput. I did a few splices and minor edits at most with YT videos and thought it was a pain in the ass. I'd guess that most of the creators are using editors from overseas to get skill at a low price. Not just skill, but they're paying for someone's time, and the cost of time of anyone in the US isn't cheap. 

I think I forgot to make my point about Arch - a lot of the responses were more along the lines of "if I'm at work, I'm using ubuntu because I just want something that works". I installed the LTS ubuntu and kubuntu versions instead of the most recent roll outs based on the discussion of stability. 

(forgot to also say, very clear when you get ubuntu that there is a commercial side to it, which is encouraging - the viability on the free side is incented/supported by the fact there is also a commercial market for it). 

There's a user of this forum who uses openSUSE. We'll see if he actually is still reading.

Added later 17 h 58 min 46 s:

OK, the drive format that I have in the drive that will not be read by any PC I have is the M2 sata long SSD style in the picture above. 

Or that's the pin format on the drive. 

looking further, it appears to be M.2 2280 format by part number, even though it says pretty much nothing on it. 

There are three slots in the 7540 laptop, and a fourth if you buy connectors to install a 2.5" drive. the second slot doesn't recognize this old 180gb ssd, but the third additonal slot off in the periphery recognizes it without issue. 

this being the slow drive I mentioned above, but maybe wiping it out with a linux install and using it will remove that problem. 

Never intended to learn much about all of these formats. At the moment, form the PC that I started with that was broken physically, I also have an msata small SSD that I cannot connect to anything that I have, so I found an adapter on amazon for $8 that has the 2.5" drive format, and I'll use it in an external bay until I can pull all of the data from it.

Peter -I just noticed all of these installs on the ubuntu page, including lubuntu and ubuntu studio, and I didn't know there was a non-mint cinnamon version of ubuntu, but that's also there. 

Aside from faffing with drives, and kubunto failing at burning an image (plenty of other options now, though - the mint PC or son's ubuntu PC upstairs - not sure what happened to the KDE iso burner, but it's not in the library and not on the PC, and two third party apps that are don't work). 

too...as I'm making a dupe copy of the user files on the old 180gb SSD that the mrs used and the computer itself got fried, but SSD OK, the terrible slowness of the adapter that I bought to read it (the PCB and USB hookup), not there. It's not fast, but it's a lot faster with an internal SSD to SSD copy.

Added later 58 s:

Peter Martin wrote:

@David Weaver,

Curious as to how things are going.  Still with Mint? Any issues?

I've stopped distro-hopping and settled firmly on the Arch-based CachyOS and the LXQt desktop. It's proven to be both fast and reliable, and there's nothing Windows or Mac offer I can't do using free Linux software.

Mint, base ubuntu, ubuntu studio and I tried kubuntu. For whatever reason, kubuntu has been the sketchiest. Mint and ubuntu base are the two most reliable. 

They are all based on ubuntu, but pretty big differences on package preference (snaps vs. flatpaks vs. debs). Mint and ubuntu would be my choices, though. 

seven computers on either mint, ubuntu or ubuntu studio now. Including one that dad is using. son is using two, i'm using two (a third is spare, not really needed, but none of these are expensive - they're all 9th to 12th gen cpus) and wife is using one of the two on ubuntu studio. I'm also on ubuntu studio with the current machine (7560 with an 11955m - four or five years old, whatever, it's still super slick for the stuff I do). 

The cost of all of these PCs probably equals the cost of one new mid-high end laptop, or one mid-level mac.

Peter Martin wrote:

@David Weaver,

Mint has a Debian edition (LMDE) for those who prefer it to Ubuntu. Many don't like how Ubuntu has forced Snap into their distros.

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Yeah, I get that. There are a lot of people who don't like canonical based on the snaps. I get canonical's viewpoint, wanting to control what's used for stability. 

I have mint cinnamon, which doesn't use snaps by default, and it's super slick with debs. Right click, install. blam, as long as there aren't missing dependencies (ahem...like some of the old brother scanners-  you have to install an outdated libsane to get the old scanners to work, mint's software updated throws up a flag at that, so you have to save terminal install commands to use an old scanner - that's on brother. I just bought the newer version for $80 to cease doing that. I don't scan that much, though, and realistically, it's a less than a minute thing to do the workaround). 

OK, back to ubuntu - I get all of those bits of gripe from different users, but I'm good with gnome in ubuntu and am a "low power" user. I have always bought PCs with levels of memory in mind for windows to function cleanly, so resources are no problem. 

Arch has a bigger chance of not supporting some of my hardware - not saying I won't give it a shot in the future, or use debian base instead of ubuntu, who knows. But for now, everything pretty much works great, and the whole scanner thing above is my cheapness and being interested in figuring out a workaround. Which...there supposedly isn't one - it didn't take that much energy to figure it out despite being a fairly clueless user. The smarter one is just using it as an excuse to get a newer portable scanner. 

kubuntu and ubuntu cinnamon (less stable, both, vs. ubuntu base and mint) have had more quirks. Ubuntu cinnamon probably would get die hards enraged "wait, you skipped mint so you could get the same interface and get stuck with gnome and snaps?"..well, just wanted to try it. The quirks were stuff like a window every couple of days saying there had been an error in the background, but I think the message was probably an error or whatever went on was inconsequential.