Replacing Windows with Linux

[anu1908]

-snip-

driver issue is not that common if you use a fairly new distros and of course your hardware is not way too old. i've used mint, ubuntu, kali, arch-based linux in the past and my $200 laptop bought in 2014 work just fine. my new laptop is using linux too and it runs perfectly since the beginning (i used ubuntu 18.04) except the wifi which requires some hacks.

ubuntu and mint is probably one of the best and friendly distro that i've used and works well for office tasks.

that being said, my desktop is still using windows as i need it to run my games or make music (i'm a content creator, needs to play game to make my content).

[Carlton Banks]

ubuntu and mint is probably one of the best and friendly distro

please stop repeating this nonsense (can you not read the thread?)


Ubuntu and Mint (along with Red Hat and Fedora) are amongst the worst choice you could make.


The main reason for people ditching Windows these days is because Microsoft are capturing ALL data from Windows computers (and rolled out a "free" update to Windows 10 to make this task easier).

Ubuntu and Mint both included similar stuff, capturing web data and sending it all to Amazon. All to help you, of course!

[Jet Cash]

Soros has just bought a load of shares in Red Hat. I wonder why he did that.

[anu1908]

ubuntu and mint is probably one of the best and friendly distro

please stop repeating this nonsense (can you not read the thread?)

yes sir.

[friends1980]

Soros has just bought a load of shares in Red Hat. I wonder why he did that.

Still waiting for your experiences in the last months, JC

FYI, I've received my new notebook in the meantime. I haven't started with a clean Linux MX install but just moved my HD from my old to my new laptop. It's a HP Probook 470 G5, not known as the most Linux-friendly notebooks... However, it's running smoothly and it's extremely silent, which is a huge difference compared to my old gaming laptop. Sometimes, my screen remains black after restarting from sleep modus. Also, my laptop freezes when I leave fullscreen modus in VLC. Quite peculiar, since I've never had any troubles before. I've switched the graphic card settings from the Hybrid card in the BIOS configuration. This seems to have solved the issue. No problems since, but it has only been 3 days, so we'll see...

Carlton Banks, what's your opinion about MX? I'm always interested to find out (and try out) new alternatives.

[Carlton Banks]

Carlton Banks, what's your opinion about MX? I'm always interested to find out (and try out) new alternatives.

meh, it's a tough call, I'm not unenthusiastic


There's a bad aspect to the Linux laissez-faire model: too much choice, to the point of being overwhelming. That's part of the reason why the "main" distros (red hat, debian, slackware, gentoo) rose to the top in the 2000's; there was so much choice that people chose by listening to the technical assessments of people they trust, not by making their own judgements. And to a certain extent, that's how it's continued, distros like Ubuntu just built on top of the trust built up in the Debian brand.

Taking the trust out of the decision making process is therefore the best route around that issue, and so the "source based" distro was born (I think gentoo and crux were the first). Now of course, that approach simply saw a proliferation of models, but at least it's easy to see which is better (gentoo wins on ecosystem and support/community, guix and nixOS have the best trust-less tech model)


So MX? It's cool that they're following Unix principles and dropping Systemd. But the whole Linux/Unix model is advancing further in the trustless direction, and that's the trend I'm gonna follow. As a Bitcoiner, trustless tech makes more sense to me.

[friends1980]

Carlton Banks, what's your opinion about MX? I'm always interested to find out (and try out) new alternatives.

There's a bad aspect to the Linux laissez-faire model: too much choice, to the point of being overwhelming. That's part of the reason why the "main" distros (red hat, debian, slackware, gentoo) rose to the top in the 2000's; there was so much choice that people chose by listening to the technical assessments of people they trust, not by making their own judgements. And to a certain extent, that's how it's continued, distros like Ubuntu just built on top of the trust built up in the Debian brand.

Taking the trust out of the decision making process is therefore the best route around that issue, and so the "source based" distro was born (I think gentoo and crux were the first). Now of course, that approach simply saw a proliferation of models, but at least it's easy to see which is better (gentoo wins on ecosystem and support/community, guix and nixOS have the best trust-less tech model)

I have never thought about it this way. A very interesting point of view, and I do agree - of course - that the best way of finding your own distro would be by making my own judgment. That principle goes for everything in life.

But wouldn't it be extremely time-consuming to install and test every (serious) distro that's out there? I guess you'd need several days and even weeks to make up your mind for only one distro. By the time I'd have substantially tested several distros, I'd have to restart from the beginning, since their development is evolving so rapidly.

[Carlton Banks]

But wouldn't it be extremely time-consuming to install and test every (serious) distro that's out there? I guess you'd need several days and even weeks to make up your mind for only one distro. By the time I'd have substantially tested several distros, I'd have to restart from the beginning, since their development is evolving so rapidly.

well, yes. that is the problem, many of the people reading this thread are doing so simply to save some time in choosing something out of the excess of choices. Equally bad even for the source-based distros I'm advocating; they've all got a different way of handling package installation, and learning them all to find out which you prefer would be too much

like in any market, good and bad products lead the pack. Red Hat are trying to use software engineering to change Linux into an entirely Red Hat product; bad. Debian was just a simple, reliable, conservative linux distro. Canonical and Mint started to infest Debian as a by-product of that success, Debian is now going (well, already gone) bad. Even in Gentoo, "purists" complain about antagonist devs pushing the distro in questionable directions. It'll probably remain like this till the closed-source model dies, and that's not going to happen soon.

this all sounds very elitist though (yet another Linux issue ). at the risk of contradicting myself, I'll say: if e.g. Ubuntu suddenly started getting massively popular against Windows, I wouldn't complain. At least not straight away