Why you should replace Windows 7 with Linux
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@JohnConnorBear
As far as a simple and intuitive graphical user interface is concerned, let's assume the OOTB Windows XP or Windows 7 fits that definition, since Windows (since 95) essentially copied the early Mac GUI, and those conventions of menus, task bar, start button, etc. have become the de facto standard. (88% market share vs <2% market share).
Wallpaper is completely changeable so I'm not including that, although if there is (or was) a standard wallpaper it would have been the XP Bliss default wallpaper.
I won't follow you into the weeds on the Linux/GNU kernel thing. The OP is speaking of Windows 7 users swapping their OS for Linux.
Which begs the question: which Linux?
To define terms, if this OP is written from the perspective of current (at the time, Win7) users switching from the MS universe over to the Linux universe, then that would entail the operating system, its GUI (and no, the 88% used to a GUI are not going to stop what they are otherwise doing to learn the hieroglyphics of the CLI of the highly splintered, less than 2 percent Linux universe), the range of devices that will work with that OS (e.g. drivers), the availability and ease of use of application software, and soooo importantly, how standard that software is across the business world.
Linux has improved over the almost 30 years of its existence, as far as being intuitive and easy to use, largely by adopting Windows-like menus and keystroke combinations. I have seen commenters praise MINT and ZORIN as likely adoption candidates for those wanting to switch.
Insofar as "revitalization" of hardware, it absolutely does exist. Machines 10 years or older were designed to work with WinXP or Win7, and the internet architecture similarly designed to work with WinXP and later, Win7 machines.
But the overall architecture of the OS / desktop hardware / internet changed and now 32bit systems, fine in their heyday, were showing their age. Browsers, beyond a certain age, were rejected by websites, like banking applications and streaming video. Manufacturers took down driver support for motherboards, add-on cards and other devices.
The 32bit machine with an Atom or Pentium-M processor had become an unsupported hunk of junk, at least in its Windows guise.
Enter Linux, and specifically, the small constellation of distros coded specifically to work with such hardware and have device drivers for such hardware.
The machine, which was otherwise an orphaned outcast from the Windows universe, could now operate with sufficient speed, could communicate again with its devices (sound, video, wifi, etc..) and to be able to once again surf the internet so as to comprise a second lease on life, eg, revitalized.
So Linux does have a place for those who want to extend the useful life of at least some older machines.
The only remaining question is whether, once revitalized by distros such as LXLE or Linux Lite, whether they can have their GUI themed to resemble the Win2000 / WinXP / Win7 desktops, to give the install a familar face to those who have otherwise been using Windows all along.
This last item causes apoplexy in some of the more prissy Sheldon Cooper type purists, while other Linux users jump in with both feet to welcome converts and compile Windows- themed icon and taskbar packages for exactly that purpose.
And that's a good thing.
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@Gaëlle Thank you. Merci. Danke.
Yes, that's fine.
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@HAL2000 I don't know if you've thought to poke around with Q4OS. I found I was able to get it running well on an old 1.8 GHz P4, 1GB RAM machine, and it was built from the ground up to look and act an awful lot like XP. That hardware was so limited the BIOS could not even be made to boot from USB (the option did not exist in the BIOS), so I had to burn a CD (no DVD optical drive on the machine) to load it. But hey - it works.
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@Ayespy Actually, I've been wrestling with Q4OS, which themes very, very nicely to all sorts of Windows, with a single download, and reemerges from the changing room as XPQ4. Additionally, those German rascals at Q4OS have come up with a respin of that combination, adding in WINE and calling that version FreeXP.
Alas, it is Debian based, versus Ubuntu based. The difference is that the Ubuntu family of distros (Lubuntu, Linux Lite, LXLE, etc...) all readily recognize sound, video and wifi, and webcam devices even before being completely loaded. Q4OS, in contrast, is, IMHO, even faster than the lightweight Ubuntu distros, but can't or won't recognize a Schload of devices, to include things like Wireless PCMCIA cards and webcams.
It's been a tough slog with Q4OS, despite lots of help:
https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=18083#p18083
And they can't fault me for not trying hard enough, and more experienced Linux users for not trying to lend a hand. Some of them tried very hard.
Ultimately, I swapped out the HDD (to leave the original Q4OS install intact) and with a fresh HDD loaded Puppy Linux 32, and voila the PCMCIA came to life. I searched and found this forum while looking for a means to Theme Puppy Linux and posted, using an old Sony Vaio PCG-FRV26, 2.6GHz and less than 1 Gig of RAM (I tried swapping out the modules for 2x1GB RAM modules, but for one reason or another, 890 MB is the most the machine would recognize. BIOS flash?).
Prognosis: Puppy 32-bit still had very good attached device recognition, but not as fast navigating / downloading as Q4OS. Q4OS has released an experimental distro of it, based on Ubuntu, but only in 64-bit, alas.
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@Ayespy ADDENDUM: Re: No USB recognition. Absolutely. I downloaded HIREN'S ULTIMATE BOOT CD and had that in the CD-drive, while having the Linux ISO on a USB drive, using YUMI. Once booted, the BIOS was set to look for the internal CD drive first, where it found HIREN's. Once there, I scrolled down to PLOP! (a USB boot utility), and the USB-based ISO was located.
PLOP! is very handy.
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@HAL2000 Ah, well. Can't say you're not putting in the effort...
My Q4OS recognized all of my obsolete and "modern" (read USB keyboard, mouse, Wi-Fi) hardware without a hitch, so that was lucky. Still, the old hardware was so insufferably lame, that box is back in the closet and only my five main Vivaldi testbeds remain.
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@Ayespy Ha! So you use the term "testbed" as well. Aviation background?
This is some background of what I've been trying to achieve (with mixed success) with Linux.
https://www.linux.org/threads/distro-candidates-mx-vs-antix-which-is-best-for-the-following-purpose.29112/post-92473I am trying to find the best distro and then mass produce a bunch of revived machines for some kids in schools overseas. (Don't worry, my contact says there is a local tech to get things unstuck if something goes pearshaped once the machines are in front of the kids).
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@HAL2000 , a good search engine for kids is Swisscows, secure, privat and absolutly family save (no option to change this)
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@HAL2000 No aviation background, but my dad was an aerospace physicist, mathematician, etc.
Geez - if there were a handy way to ship them to you, I have two old laptops and three old desktops, plus a couple of spare monitors that would be prime for your project...
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@Ayespy Thank you for the thought. Actually I have so much accumulated stuff that I can afford to be generous (the folks were going to stage a Hoarder intervention, all waiting for me when I came home). I know for a fact, through testing, that these machines can zip around if they don't try to download a Windows program, but just use the basic configuration and save their projects on their own flash drives. I'd much rather each kid get a machine, even if it's basic, than make a little pocket money, selling them for scrape.
My Panamanian contact said the kids were thrilled with the first shipment, especially the Windows machines. Go figure.
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@Catweazle Just curious, were you running XP games in Win7 using XP compatibility mode?
I found an ancient CD of Arcade classics (Battle Zone, Missile Command, Tempest, Centipede...) along with some other games. I've been loading some of these on donation machines: Red Baron, Fury III, and HE!!BENDER (voiced by Scully of X-Files), along with HOVER! and Pinball from a Win95 install CD. The XP compatibility mode worked well, but of course, your mileage may vary.
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@HAL2000 , more curious is that Windows 10 is more compatible with older games than Windows 7.
I have a Dark Messiah CD, good game but only for XP, I needed headaches and a patch so I could play it in Windows 7, but in Windows 10 it works without any problems.
In older Arcade games, it is almost better to have DOS versions and use them in DOS Box. But there are also old classics that work smoothly on any Windows or direct in the browser -
@Catweazle Really cool link. Could not find ZERO WING though. Ya know, the kids of this generation will never know the sensory overload of a packed arcade, with a pocketful of quarters. Perhaps that little thrill for young men has been replaced by having a harassment complaint by some 250 pound, muffin-topped screech with blue hair. I dunno, maybe there's some positive magic thing young men are enjoying to make up for the loss of a live arcade.
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@jrsilvey If you are interested in the technical details, then probably https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html is the first point of contact to get a technical overview and comparison of the X11 and Wayland architecture.
For an even deeper dive into the technical details, I recommend reading https://wayland-book.com. However, this is only interesting if you are interested in implementing your own Wayland clients. It goes as deep as even explaining the low-level wire protocol with which servers (i.e. desktops) and clients (i.e. GUI applications) communicate.
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@zakius I am not sure what you mean. But hotkeys / shortcuts can go to the compositor or forwarded to the client. No other client can read the keyboard unless the compositor explicitly forwards these events to the active client. So if you want to close windows with Alt+F4, your compositor has to catch this combination and close the window.
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@Christian-Rauch ok- but at the moment Google and Cloudflare run scripts that can read everything - even what you try to stop with Wayland.
The insecurity is, however, miles different compare to Windows. Another league where you have access rights and you can establish and enforce protection. You do not have shared memory that everyone can access and they can access anywhere. X11 establishes a common platform for UI and the rest. Here we can educate and train people to do it correctly.
We can lock the house, and do not have to leave it to some police force to monitor and manage security on an insecure platform.
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@HAL2000 Windows is no "operating system" and you abuse 3 letter abbreviations badly. I "negotiated" Linux in 1988 when we defined the 88 platform, and we had prototypes of Windows running above the 640K address restrictions. The issue with the internet is that the Internet uses a communication protocol called TCP and this is an ITU standard, approved even by the FCC in the USA - in "RFC". Windows by Microsoft is using the code developed by Xerox to make their Smalltalk. This was a very restricted piece of software, intended just to get Smalltalk developed, and detached from the development of TCP/IP at MIT. There are numerous features that XNS will not support, like "HangUp" and "Sense" that is used to implement Events.
All Linux distributions support TCP/ip in full. They are based on the full Unix System V "Interface Definition". Windows as you see it has very few features enabled compared with all Linux releases. The different Linux releases are different drivers and graphical user interfaces. The operating system is the same - the Linux Kernel. The only question is when simple people will realise that what they believe firmly is wrong.
If you want an elegant look, take a pick. If you have old 32-bit computers, the hardware will restrict the variants you can use - it is not the code in Linux: this is coded in C and it is the same. You may also port code with fancy graphics to this old distro. Windows is not that difficult and unique - search KDE or "MeeGo" or on to "OpenPlasma" with widgets and graphics available for free - distributions like the Chinese "DeepIn". This is where modern graphics are designed - the instruments in new cars. If you want a simple, try Linux Mint Cinnamon. It is identical to Ubuntu just without neon borders. The colour is a choice and it is not "technology". -
@Knuthf You know, it takes no extra effort to communicate, exchange information and opinions without being obnoxious. While I appreciate information tips and tricks, I simply block those who fail in social skills. Try again?
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@potmeklecbohdan Now THAT was a very interesting article.
I don't know how much of my posts you have read, but my interest in Linux is twofold:
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My immediate mission to revive a bunch of old but serviceable hardware, and give it to kids as free, functional computers, whereas, otherwise, they have nothing.
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For my own use as a replacement for Windows 7 when this faithful old horse finally cannot be used.
My background involved computer security in Washington DC, during the Cold War, but not in coding so much, but with respect to policy and procedure, shielded enclosures, Tempesting of workstations and the like. I later would work in DC reviewing the corporate telecom / internet mergers.
During this time I became aware of all those things which Snowden confirmed with his disclosures, from the days of THE PUZZLE PALACE, ECHELON and the war against Phil Zimmermann's PGP (yes, this goes back years, probably before the memory of most here).
So privacy is an issue as well. It took some time before I could read your article, since for some reason, on another machine I was using your FYI link did not work in that browser.
Since I am still exploring many strains of Linux and have not made a commitment (although for donations, I am leaning towards Q4OS/XPQ4), perhaps now is a good time to learn more about BSM.
Being a Windows Refugee, I had been under the impression that BSD was just another version of Linux. I welcome any additional information you'd like to steer me towards with regard to BSD.
Thank you, very much.
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@Christian-Rauch said in Why you should replace Windows 7 with Linux:
Every X11 application on your desktop that runs as the same user can access every mouse and keyboard input. To make this more clear: Any X11 application (e.g. Steam games) that runs in parallel to Vivaldi can access your typed passwords
IMO it is excellent that you mentioned this. I do not game [at all], so the following might immediately be of no interest to those who do, but, fwiw. I run
Firejail
on both my laptop & tower PCs. For all apps that either do not "need", or which claim they need but which i do not want to be able to access the internet, i add the--protocol=unix
option to their custom launchers. Thus, for all these apps anytime they run, there is simply no such thing as "the internet" at all. Even if one of those apps were to be malicious & intent on stealing any of my private data [passwords, finance info, whatever], & even though i still run x11 not Wayland, it simply has no way to be able to "call home to mother".Those apps which by definition must have net access [for me that's limited only to Thunderbird + my browsers], standard Firejail operation sandboxes them from accessing all private data other than what they need to run with their own specific
~/.config/
directory.Anyway, as i said ... fwiw.