Solved Switch to Linux

Back in the Win95/98 era I had top notch hardware and so did my friends. We always had networking and other hardware issues and yes, the systems crashed very frequently.

Win98SE fixed a lot of that. Win2000 was quite stable but useless for gaming. The beta builds were super fast for gaming though.

Windows ME was totally useless, it crashed daily. Was really fast and snappy though.

Vista was horrible at first but eventually they fixed it and it was ok.

XP was brilliant, until it became so unsecure that it was totally useless too.

7 was really good...8 was totally useless but 8.1 was quite good again. 10 has been the best so far and 11 is also OK, since they share common base.

Quite happy with Windows 11 so far, but my hardware is not supported and won't upgrade for a while.

I've been using Linux all this time...on and off. Never had any major issues. And lately Linux has become so decent that I could use either that or Windows for my daily tasks. I don't really care which one I fire up daily.

System Upgrade also worked like a charm. Linux Mint does this right. This is why I love that distribution.

pparks1 said:

My first experience with Linux was about 25 years ago, around 1998. My wife was gone for the weekend, and I bought a big 800 page Que manual for Calera open linux and I started reading and installing it on some old machines I had lying around. Probably took a solid year or so of playing with Linux back then to get comfortable with it.

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Ah yes, Caldera Open Linux, that was purchased by the infamous SCO Group, who tried to extort money from anyone who had the audacity of making a distro. Yes good times that was...

yeah, i didn't stick with it (caldera open linux), but was the book that I bought at the time.

I have almost always run a Red Hat based distro, either Red Hat Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux or Fedora. I've also used the RHEL clones like CentOS and now Rocky Linux (in fact, used more of them, then the actual red hat distros).

I have used some Ubuntu (and Linux Mint) as they are quite common, and Ubuntu is what I use in WSL.

@neves , When I was using Mandrake Linux I really Like It. The only thing I didn't like was in the beginning I had to use dial-up internet to download any builds. It would take two to three days to download it. That doesn't include the times I had to start over. I eventually found a source to buy Mandrake on a disk. Before I stopped using it, I could buy the boxed versions in the store. The reason why I stopped using Windows was that I hated Vista. Somehow I found out that Microsoft was going to offer users to test Windows 7. If it wasn't for Windows 7 it's possible that
Linux would still be my main OS. Now I just play around with Linux Mint in a VM on my laptop. With the direction MS is taken Windows there may be a day I'll switch back to Linux.

SlicEnDicE said:

Back in the Win95/98 era I had top notch hardware and so did my friends. We always had networking and other hardware issues and yes, the systems crashed very frequently.

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Mid 90s - > early 2000 had the most fun using PCs. That's when the internet turn mainstream in Europe, tho... we're talking 2 - 6 kb/s internet speed (good enough for mIRC, the most basic form of web browsing and a bit of online gaming like Starcraft - at high latency). On the other hand - that's also when Local Networks started spreading in all directions, when LAN Parties where fun events for PC lovers - when Internet/Gaming Cafes were at their peak of glory (in Europe - at least) - a time when gaming was really fun experienced locally. Worked at one those Net Cafes for 4 years (since the age of 16) - and all systems were using Windows 98 while the server was using RedHat. And yeah.... Windows 98 was a complete mess by present standards - cause back then... was so used to bugs, crashes and viruses - that i concluded that to be the norm (as if that's how an OS is suppose to work).

Used to reinstall Windows at least 1 a month - but those were the good times... cause at one point the infamous virus Love32 arrived at out virtual doorstep - corrupting .exe/.dll files. Funny thing - Norton AV was able to detect them - but since it would infect system files "it used to DELETE them (yeah, Win 98 - would actually allow you to delete system files)" - the system would crash and Windows was done. Only thing left was reinstall every 2 days (if not daily). AV solutions were pretty bad. Only counter for that was DeepFreeze - but that came at the cost of system resources (already limited). Win 98 had so many security holes and bugs - that even kids knew about it. For example - the infamous C:\Con\Con - which made it possible to remotely crash any system on the NW (and ofc, first they would delete system32 files... ). On the other hand, the weakest system was running RedHat - till manually rebooted once a week or every 2 weeks. Tho, still... RedHat came with a GUI - and the "cool kids (faculty of informatics students)" - were not that impressed with this distribution. FreeBSD (this is basically a whole OS - not just the Kernel - but is can install GUI/WM used by Linux distribution) it's where it was at - for achieving higher performance and better stability with weaker hardware. And yet, today FreeBSD has 0.000001% Market Share (even tho PlayStation 4's OS is based of FreeBSD 9.0).

As for the other versions of Windows, i actually liked Win2000 SP4 - tho, my PC at that time was a Duron 1300 + GeForce2 MX 400 + 256 DDR (only 128 at first :) - so even in gaming was doing slighly better than Windows XP SP2. It's Windows Millennium that i didn't see the point. But you said you had a good system so, yeah... on a system with Athlon CPU and 512 DDR - Windows XP was more ideal.

Windows Vista on the other hand - as i've came to realize only latter: was ahead of its time. As mentioned above, Games had higher requirements - so gamers (who afford it) - had capable enough systems even while using Windows XP, but - if not much of a gamer - even 128 Ram was enough... and that's what most Windows users were using to run Wind 2k and XP (Low End CPUs + 128 or 256 Ram). And that's... what they used to try Windows Vista - where 512 Ram was a requirement - while even the GPU needed 128 ram for a flashy experience with transparency enabled and such. The thing is - around the same time Core 2 was also released - where again - gamers and enthusiast felt the urge for an upgrade - we're talking far more capable CPUs and 2 GB ram becoming a standard (while Gamers went for 4 GB Ram). This systems were more than capable to run Vista and by the time Windows 7 was launched - quite a lot of people upgraded their systems, so.... no surprise Windows 7 was running great "despite having way higher requirements". It's just that many users already had capable enough hardware"

Windows 8 was a trial and error again - cause Microsoft envisioned Touch Screens as being the next best thing (while seeing the huge success Apple had with iPhones and iPad). But it wasn't.... Metro was/is one of the worst UI developed by Microsoft. Pissed a lot of gamers too - cause was wasting resources without adding anything (useful). With 8.1 they improved performance - and with Win 10 they got it right - by reverting back to Windows 7 appearance wise. But also solid performance.

Windows 11 was... unexpected. For many Windows 10 was suppose to be the last. That's what a dev infamously announced - when Win 10 was released: Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 'the last version of Windows' Looking back - many say it wasn't an official statement by Microsoft. Sure, you could say that but... in all that time Microsoft didn't deny it - not till the announcement for Win 11. That being said... they were profiting from that unofficial statement. Anyway, Windows 11 was doing ok on launch - mainly cause Microsoft was trying to show - they learned from past mistakes. But... they screwed up with Windows 11 22h2 - piddling of gamers again. And since gamers have the loudest mouths - they kept shouting everywhere that Windows 11 sux...

Winuser said:

@neves , When I was using Mandrake Linux I really Like It. The only thing I didn't like was in the beginning I had to use dial-up internet to download any builds. It would take two to three days to download it. That doesn't include the times I had to start over. I eventually found a source to buy Mandrake on a disk. Before I stopped using it, I could buy the boxed versions in the store. The reason why I stopped using Windows was that I hated Vista. Somehow I found out that Microsoft was going to offer users to test Windows 7. If it wasn't for Windows 7 it's possible that
Linux would still be my main OS. Now I just play around with Linux Mint in a VM on my laptop. With the direction MS is taken Windows there may be a day I'll switch back to Linux.

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Fair enough. As mentioned in my previous post - that's the same reason why i started with Ubuntu: you just had to make a order on their site - and they would send the copies by mail Free Of Charge.

neves said:

As for the other versions of Windows, i actually liked Win2000 SP4 - tho, my PC at that time was a Duron 1300 + GeForce2 MX 400 + 256 DDR (only 128 at first :) - so even in gaming was doing slighly better than Windows XP SP2.

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Back in the day I had a dual CPU system with a Voodoo 3 3000 card.

When we played with friends, I ran Linux, while others used Windows. In Unreal Tournament I hosted the server on a separate instance and had another one for the actual game play. Even with 2 instance on my system, I had twice the frame rate as my friends. Good times.

That MX 2 400 was a faster card, but colors where "washed out", thus I stuck with my Voodoo. nVidia cheating a bit to seem like it's better. Same was going on between ATI and nVidia for a very long time. At that time I lost interest in computing altogether so I have a huge IT gap.

Fun fact though: I used Linux way before the world knew such thing even existed. It was pure terminal but very powerful already then.

pparks1 said:

My first experience with Linux was about 25 years ago, around 1998. My wife was gone for the weekend, and I bought a big 800 page Que manual for Calera open linux and I started reading and installing it on some old machines I had lying around. Probably took a solid year or so of playing with Linux back then to get comfortable with it.

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I started with Slackware Linux around 1997. I had a PC with 486 DX2 66MHz CPU. It was really primitive because every time it booted it had to scan for hardware. If it guessed the hardware wrong it loaded the wrong driver. I changed to Redhat and stuck with it until Fedora came out. People have it easy today. The first few releases of Fedora were a little rough. For example:

One Fedora release after it updated the kernel broke X Windows. It turned out that was because they included the wrong version of GCC in that Fedora release.

Another Fedora release screwed up the partitioning on the system disk. I had dual-boot with Windows so after Fedora was installed neither it or Windows would boot. I complained about that but the developers said the bug wouldn't be fixed until the next release. An online search led to a fix. It was fixed by:

1. I booted using the Fedora rescue CD
2. When I got to the command-line I ran fdisk
3. I listed the boundary parameters for all partitions and wrote them down
4. I then deleted all the partitions
5. I ran fdisk again and recreated all partitions using the parameters I wrote down
6. After I rebooted both Windows and Fedora worked

About twelve years ago I gave up on Linux. Now if I need a Linux fix I boot one of my Raspberry Pis. Note the Raspberry Pi OS is an ARM port of Debian Linux. BTW, I normally just remote into one of the Pis with the RealVNC Viewer.

Despite so much progress, even Ubuntu which is said to be the easiest Linux distribution with great community support, is not as easy as using the mouse in Windows. Hardware support has improved but not complete and the drivers are mostly third-party solutions enabling only basic functionality of the device. If you want all device features you need proprietary drivers that either don't exist or have too many bugs and incompatibilities that you are forced to use the generic limited drivers. For example, I tried the proprietary graphics driver on a laptop and the display was distorted and I couldn't use it, so I reverted to the generic limited driver, not really desirable. Also application support has improved but nowhere near the vast selection and ease of use of Windows applications. So, yes, I admit it is easier to use Linux today, but not that easy to recommend to a novice computer user. Every issue they have, every single thing they cannot do they are going to call me all the time to help them. In Windows I could help them in a few minutes, but in Linux I would have to do a lot of search in Ask Ubuntu or elsewhere. No thanks, I would rather deal with Windows minor issues and have my sanity. All of you that were using Linux since the '90s, good for you. As I said it is mostly for the advanced users that like to experiment and learn new things, and of course have a lot of free time to devote. Not for the average Joe that just wants to work or play without consulting the Community for everything. It has a long way to go yet before everyone can use it in place of Windows. If it was ready to completely replace Windows, it would have done already. It wouldn't still have too small user base.

spapakons said:

If it was ready to completely replace Windows, it would have done already. It wouldn't still have too small user base.

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It isn't about replacing anything. Windows and Linux complement each other. Both with strengths and weaknesses.

Linux user base would be much bigger if it wasn't free and in most cases non-profit. Linux is mostly free self marketing, while Windows has billions of dollars to play with. And the more people use it the more money they have to play with, so ofc. they push for Windows being the default on all machines you purchase.

This marketing and sales model has worked great for several decades now.

SlicEnDicE said:

It isn't about replacing anything. Windows and Linux complement each other. Both with strengths and weaknesses.

Linux user base would be much bigger if it wasn't free and in most cases non-profit. Linux is mostly free self marketing, while Windows has billions of dollars to play with. And the more people use it the more money they have to play with, so ofc. they push for Windows being the default on all machines you purchase.

This marketing and sales model has worked great for several decades now.

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Actually companies like Red Hat/IBM , and SUSE get loads of dosh from the corporate market by supplying consultancy and maintenance contracts for their enterprise server products.

Linux is quite capable of taking care of itself - and the whole open source thing gives a chance for world wide people to contribute / make new ideas rather than be bound to follow some particular business's own rules and conventions. OK disadvantages in that but I think most Linux users can live with that. Word of mouth works particularly as W11 is demanding more and more sophisticated hardware which most typical domestic users don't need.

As I've posted previously I've set up a decent workspace for some Windows users to try a Linux desktop out which I've made to look more or less like Windows and none of them have had any difficulty at all in doing anything -- apart from email where some found Thunderbird a bit confusing and preferred Outlook. Edge browser runs on Linux although none had problems with firefox

on the desktop with KDE Kmail looks and behaves like outlook but it's a bit of a dog to set up properly. I'll see how those users get on with that one.

Anyway instead of all these posts saying how Windows users could never get used to Linux or would hate it -- I went out there and actually TESTED it with some Windows users who weren't particularly computer savvy and found the results OK -- the trick is to set up the workspace pretty much identically to what they were used to. These users aren't applying fixes, updating their systems, tweaking them etc -- and by using a LTSC model they don't have to either.

Cheers
jimbo

That's because nobody informed them they can bypass compatibility check and install Windows 11 on their existing computer, even 15 years old like my main 3rd generation PC (see 2nd system specs) without any loss of performance or compatibility compared to Windows 7/8/10 64-bit. In fact due to better resources management Windows 11 is faster than Windows 10 64-bit in some computers with the same drivers and same configuration. And as I have said, using the Office suite and browsing the internet can be done with ease from any OS. This is not a general purpose computer, is a smart typewriter. The challenge comes when they want to do something more creative, such as creating or converting music and videos, editing their photos or videos and even playing games. You may never play games, but many do and don't like being limited in either available games to choose from or performance. For better performance you need proprietary drivers that either are not always available or don't work right for all systems and all Linux distros, so you have to resort to generic limited-feature drivers with less than ideal performance. Playing a Windows game through Wine also has some performance penalty. That's without considering how easy is to install on Windows vs installing it in Wine. It is not always that easy as running setup. Need to say more? If you instead of installing Linux you bypass compatibility check and install Windows 11 on their unsupported systems they will adore you. They will feel like their computers are granted at least 5 years more life.

spapakons said:

That's because nobody informed them they can bypass compatibility check and install Windows 11 on their existing computer, even 15 years old like my main 3rd generation PC (see 2nd system specs) without any loss of performance or compatibility compared to Windows 7/8/10 64-bit. In fact due to better resources management Windows 11 is faster than Windows 10 64-bit in some computers with the same drivers and same configuration. And as I have said, using the Office suite and browsing the internet can be done with ease from any OS. This is not a general purpose computer, is a smart typewriter. The challenge comes when they want to do something more creative, such as creating or converting music and videos, editing their photos or videos and even playing games. You may never play games, but many do and don't like being limited in either available games to choose from or performance. For better performance you need proprietary drivers that either are not always available or don't work right for all systems and all Linux distros, so you have to resort to generic limited-feature drivers with less than ideal performance. Playing a Windows game through Wine also has some performance penalty. That's without considering how easy is to install on Windows vs installing it in Wine. It is not always that easy as running setup. Need to say more? If you instead of installing Linux you bypass compatibility check and install Windows 11 on their unsupported systems they will adore you. They will feel like their computers are granted at least 5 years more life.

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I think we're thinking about different sets of users here. !!

Cheers
jimbo

Memo to myself.

Come back to this post in a decade and see if the takeup of Linux has significantly increased.

To be on the safe side, always try before you install. If you need to try it more that a couple of hours, either install on virtual machine or spare disk. In case you don't like it, no harm done. The same is true for new Windows versions as well, not only Linux. For example, I am going to clone my disk before upgrading to 24H2. If it doesn't run (unlikely) because of my unsupported system or they have other major issues I cannot solve, I will go back to 23H2. Most of the newbies using Linux will not tell the difference from Windows until they try to do something that is done completely differently and involves the Terminal. Then they start realizing they were too fast to adopt it.

cereberus said:

Memo to myself.

Come back to this post in a decade and see if the takeup of Linux has significantly increased.

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Prediction: Linux user base in PCs will be increased to 7% from 5% it is today. No big deal to consider adopting.

spapakons said:

Prediction: Linux user base in PCs will be increased to 7% from 5% it is today. No big deal to consider adopting.

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By significant, I meant doubling at least.

cereberus said:

By significant, I meant doubling at least.

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Even at 15% it is not worth replacing Windows an give up ease of use and compatibility. Even if I manage to install drivers for all my hardware, there is always the risk of buying anything not supported, such as a printer. Even if I find applications for most things I do, they won't be as easy to use or as compatible as the respective Windows applications and there is always the risk not finding an application for something new. It is like trying to use saccharin to make sweets when the recipe explicitly says "sugar". It will never taste the same no matter what you do. As I would rather use genuine sugar than any substitute, also I would rather run Windows 14 or whatever by then, not Linux.

spapakons said:

I would rather run Windows 14 or whatever by then, not Linux.

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Cool, nobody is going to stop you. And others against your best wishes will also give Linux a try.....and that's fine too.

This type of threat is never going to come to a conclusion.