With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be these computers’ only secure hope, what do you think?
My laptop is a cast off from a member of my staff who said it was too slow - a (dmidecode) - Product Name: HP 255 G6 Notebook PC. It now runs Arch (actually).
It previously slogged along with Win 10, Outlook n O365 n that. Now it does Libre Office, Evolution and much more. I use KDE, which isn’t known for a light touch on the resources. I also do light CAD and other stuff.
My office desktop is even older - it was a customer cast off, due to be skipped around six years ago. I did slap a SSD into it and I think I upped the RAM to 8GB. Its a (ssh, dmidecode): Product Name: Lenovo H330 and the BIOS is dated from 2012! I run two 23" screens off it and again, it runs Arch (actually) and KDE for pretty stuff. I run containers on it - at the moment a test Vikunja instance. I have apache, nginx and caddy fronting various experiments backed up with postgres and mariadb.
Both devices are “domain joined” and I auth to Exchange via Kerberos, via Samba winbind. File access (drive letters for the Windows mindset) is currently via autofs. I have a project on at a member of staff’s request to switch from Windows to Linux. I’m going to take my time and get it right. My current thinking is the Fedora KDE spin and this: Closed In Directory
I understand lots of the words in this post, but there are many that tell me I wouldn’t get Linux up and running on any of my laptops or PC.
If you have an old laptop or PC why not give it a go? You could start here: https://www.linuxmint.com/ Another option is to install something like Virtual Box on your existing machine and try out running it as a virtual machine or two. 2 CPUs, 4GB of RAM and 20GB of virty disc will work for any Linux distro as a VM to start off with. There’s also VMware Workstation - there’s a free version. Do discover the joy of snapshots/checkpoints which allow you to roll back failed changes!
25 years ago the options were rather more limited. I started off dual booting Windows and Linux but I don’t really recommend that these days, unless you want to run a gaming rig with both. Few people can afford two lots of top end hardware! I left Windows behind completely around 2004 or 5.