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ChronosCat

Picking an Operating System

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I'm hoping to get a new computer soon, but there's one big detail I'm having a hard time deciding on: which OS to get/use.

I'm leaning towards Windows 10 or 11 since Windows is compatible with the most software (& hardware). However, the most recent version of Windows I've used is 8.1, and I've heard some things about 10 & 11 I don't like the sound of, such as it being difficult to reliably delay updates until you're ready to install them, Windows 11 in particular making it hard to create accounts that aren't linked to Microsoft Accounts, and advertisements built into the OS. I don't know how annoying such things would be, but stuff like that makes it hard for me to trust that the Windows experience won't continue to get worse, and makes me seriously consider getting something else.

I've used a Mac before (my computer for most of the 00s was an iBook), and really liked it - but that was over a decade ago. I'm not sure how much has changed, and I'm not looking forward to going back to having the majority of software not be compatible with my computer's OS. I have heard that there's a lot more software compatible with Macs these days, and WINE to help with some that otherwise aren't (and there's always virtual machines if I'm willing to put up with a drop in performance), but I'm sure it'll still be an issue. There's also the problem that Macs tend to be more expensive than the equivalent PC, and I'm trying to get the most computer for my money.

I'm also a bit tempted by Linux. I've never used Linux before, but I've heard a lot of things I like about it (such as it having a high degree of customizability, and being more stable and secure than Windows); I also like the fact that it isn't created and maintained by some big corporation. Of course, there would be similar issues with software compatibility as with Apple, and if I wanted a computer with Linux pre-installed my options would be rather limited. And then of course there's the question of "Which distribution?" (from what I've read, probably Ubuntu or something based on it, but that only narrows things down so much).

I'm not interested in Chrome, and I don't think I'm tech savvy enough to handle an OS more obscure than Linux (and even if I could learn I don't think I'd want to take the time).

One additional option I'm considering is to get a computer with Windows on it, test out a few Linux distributions in a virtual machine, and then set the computer up to dual boot Windows and Linux. My biggest concern with this option is that I've never actually done something like it before, and I don't want to risk messing up a computer I will have just recently bought.

So, anyone have any thoughts or advice to share on the matter?

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14 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

One additional option I'm considering is to get a computer with Windows on it, test out a few Linux distributions in a virtual machine, and then set the computer up to dual boot Windows and Linux. My biggest concern with this option is that I've never actually done something like it before, and I don't want to risk messing up a computer I will have just recently bought.

That's probably your best bet.  I would say Ubuntu is your best choice for a distro, but get the LTS version.  Support for it is years long.

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If you're thinking of dual-booting Windows and Linux, I strongly recommend having two separate drives. Leave the Windows install alone, and install Linux on the second drive.

Then if you need to reinstall Windows, disconnect the Linux drive. Don't trust the Windows install process to keep its hands off.

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If you really like Macs, you probably don't want to switch.

Linux is a very viable, stable, productivity environment. If you invent the time to learn it, you will probably love it.

If you are big into video games, you may prefer Windows. I know people who swear by running Windows games on Linux, but YMMV.

If you are big into art, you my prefer Windows or Mac, depending on what tools you use.

I have seen places demand some Microsoft format file, typically Word. Open Office (I use Libre Office, an offshoot) can produce Word files; my daughter's instructors never noticed the difference.

Windows will bloat and slow your system down into obsolescence over the years, will also leave your system open prey for 'business partners'. If you can live without it, you are better off.

Chrome OS promises to be as bad as Windows.

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I am running Windows 11 with a good antivirus (Bitdefender). To date, I have sustained an attempted trojan attack through e-mail (my client is Thunderbird), which Bitdefender caught and stopped dead in its tracks. This is with a system with all updates turned on in full. If I'd delayed any updates on any of the links in the chain, it's likely my system would have let the trojan through. That's my experience on the update side of things: it does you no good to delay updates on a Windows 11 machine, and so far each update has been helpful IMHO.

I am hooked up via Microsoft Accounts, and at the very least it gives me the odd e-mail about something to expect in Windows 11 every now and then, or something about Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office - my wife and I are users, subscribed to the latest version of the service). To date, we've never seen any advertising except for the auto-install of Spotify, and that was rectified with a simple uninstall. (I don't argue in favor of Microsoft for them doing that - they shouldn't have. I merely state that they didn't plant it so deeply into the OS that it couldn't be removed with a simple command.) Nevertheless, we've seen none of the advertising that has been reported elsewhere. YMMV.

My personal experience with Windows 11 has been acceptable, and this is coming from someone who once ran Arch Linux as his distro. It is by no means as powerful as Arch in its default state, but that may be because I haven't dug into the power user systems like powershell, Windows Linux Subsystem, and so on. I've chosen to instead augment the windowed environment with programs like Ghisler's Total Commander and with Stardock's Start11 and Fences. (My one command line enhancement has been JPSoft's Take Command, and that is rarely used.)  Any significant problems I've had with Windows 11 have sprouted from seeds I've planted myself (trouble with Vivaldi's digital configuration file - had to delete it and start over, but that could have happened under any circumstances with that browser).

All in all, as an end user OS, I recommend Windows 11 for daily use, given the caveats and suggestions that I have outlined above. I have minimal experience using it as a gaming, art, or coding OS, so I cannot give any recommendations along those lines. I can give opinions as to a music production OS, and those opinions are very positive given the right production software (Cakewalk by Bandlab for MIDI/recording/mixing and Wavelab by Steinberg for final mastering, plus some other peripheral software).

One postscript suggestion I can make is a seconding of @Don Edwards's advice on dual booting Linux. When I ran Arch Linux, I had Windows installed on one boot drive and Arch installed on another boot drive. I'm sorry, but I don't remember where I had GRUB installed. @Don Edwards, where would you suggest? I'm thinking it has to be on the Windows drive, but I'm not sure.

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3 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

One postscript suggestion I can make is a seconding of @Don Edwards's advice on dual booting Linux. When I ran Arch Linux, I had Windows installed on one boot drive and Arch installed on another boot drive. I'm sorry, but I don't remember where I had GRUB installed. @Don Edwards, where would you suggest? I'm thinking it has to be on the Windows drive, but I'm not sure.

I think you can put GRUB on any drive you want, but not 100% certain. (The installer for Linux Mint will let you put it anywhere, but whether it'll actually work if not on the #1 drive, I haven't tested.)

When I installed a second drive in my laptop (a very few models have suitable space with a connector - HP Elitebooks among them), the ROM software thought it was the first drive. Slid the Windows drive over to second with no problem. I think that's a function of the hardware. And GRUB (the most common boot-loader for Linux) is able to pass booting off to the Windows boot-loader on the rare occasion when I want Windows.

I've always preferred to leave the Windows install alone unless I was wiping it out completely.

I have MS Office 2007 Pro, and some portions of it work fine under Linux using PlayOnLinux. Specifically, Word, Excel, and VBA (the macro language) are the portions I care about that work. Supposedly Powerpoint (and Exchange, I think) also works, but I don't want it. I have a link saved to a page on how to install Access so it works, but it's more complex than just telling PlayOnLinux to install it and I haven't done it yet so can't say whether it actually works.

For most people, LibreOffice is an acceptable substitute for MS Office. The database component is quite a bit different from Access, and I am negatively impressed with it. It comes with support for two macro languages, neither of which is compatible with VBA, and neither of which are currently suitable IMHO for heavy-duty use.

 

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18 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

The database component is quite a bit different from Access

If you are running Linux I suspect you will be using a "real" database, either MySQL or  Postgres.  Depending on what you are doing with it, SQLite might work.  My current project is a mix of Perl front end and SQLite back end.

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Access offers (depending on your version) a choice of database backends. All of them are real databases. Some of them are actual database servers.

The problem with Access is that its default front end violates Einstein's dictim: that you should make things as simple as possible but no simpler. (It tries too hard to look like a spreadsheet, and to hide some of the complexity inherent in databases.)

In spite of which, it's the best development environment I've seen for a single programmer to develop a single-user application that doesn't specifically need to be in a spreadsheet or word processor. (Not so good if you have multiple programmers on the project, and I haven't tried multi-user systems on a database server with an Access front-end.)

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21 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

If you're thinking of dual-booting Windows and Linux, I strongly recommend having two separate drives. Leave the Windows install alone, and install Linux on the second drive.

Then if you need to reinstall Windows, disconnect the Linux drive. Don't trust the Windows install process to keep its hands off.

I was planning on getting a laptop (I need the portability), so having multiple drives could be difficult. Certainly none of the laptops I've looked at so far had that option.

How likely is it that I'd need to re-install Windows? In the two decades I've been using computers regularly, I've never had to reinstall an OS before.

8 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

That's my experience on the update side of things: it does you no good to delay updates on a Windows 11 machine, and so far each update has been helpful IMHO.

[...]

All in all, as an end user OS, I recommend Windows 11 for daily use, given the caveats and suggestions that I have outlined above.

My home internet is limited (I pay by the GB and can only afford so much per month), so I need to be able to choose when large downloads happen (preferably when I'm somewhere I don't have to pay for data, like the library). Also, I've heard of people having Windows 10 reboot on them without warning to install updates when they were in the middle of something; I'd like to avoid that sort of situation.

Still, most of what you said makes me hopeful I'll be able to put up with Windows 11. (Who knows, I might even grow to like it. I did with Windows 8.1, much to my surprise.)

8 hours ago, mlooney said:

If you are going to run Windows, look into Cygwin so you can have BASH as your shell.

As someone who has never used Linux and is still in the process of researching it, I'm afraid I have to ask: What is the advantage of that?

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6 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

My home internet is limited (I pay by the GB and can only afford so much per month), so I need to be able to choose when large downloads happen (preferably when I'm somewhere I don't have to pay for data, like the library). Also, I've heard of people having Windows 10 reboot on them without warning to install updates when they were in the middle of something; I'd like to avoid that sort of situation.

I found the following in Windows Help for "Set your data limit":

Quote

Windows can help you stay under your data plan limit and look for ways to reduce data usage. After you set a data limit, we'll let you know when you're getting near it.

Of course, when you go to a library, you can always force the Windows Update downloads at that time, I'm guessing.

As for the "forced reboot" situation, Windows 11 is much better than Windows 10 IMHO. It gives me pop-up notifications for when I have an update pending, one of the few times I appreciate getting these. The only times I'll see them reboot on their own is when I leave for the weekend and leave the machine on - the system rebooted to the login screen , and then let me know I''d had updates while I'd been gone.

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13 hours ago, ChronosCat said:
22 hours ago, mlooney said:

If you are going to run Windows, look into Cygwin so you can have BASH as your shell.

As someone who has never used Linux and is still in the process of researching it, I'm afraid I have to ask: What is the advantage of that?

It's a much more powerful shell than Windows command line, even with PowerShell taken into account.  If you don't spend that much time at the command prompt it's most likely not really needed.  

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15 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I found the following in Windows Help for "Set your data limit":

Of course, when you go to a library, you can always force the Windows Update downloads at that time, I'm guessing.

Interesting. I'll have to look into that later (the help base article I found didn't want to open more than the first few steps, perhaps because I'm not on Windows 11).

At any rate a quick search online reveals several different ways of delaying or blocking updates. The simplest one will probably be sufficient for me: "pause updates for X weeks" in settings. I see it's also possible to set connections to "metered" and set Windows to not download updates over a metered connection; I figure I'll do that too for good measure.

Honestly, even before looking it up I knew it could be done; it's just the fact that Microsoft has made it more complicated than it used to be that bugs me.

11 hours ago, mlooney said:

It's a much more powerful shell than Windows command line, even with PowerShell taken into account.  If you don't spend that much time at the command prompt it's most likely not really needed.  

Yeah, I hardly ever use the command prompt. Pretty much the only times I do are when there's no other way to accomplish what I want, and I've only encountered such a situation a handful of times over the years.

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12 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

Yeah, I hardly ever use the command prompt. Pretty much the only times I do are when there's no other way to accomplish what I want, and I've only encountered such a situation a handful of times over the years.

I more or less live at the command prompt.  I have 1 open at all times and often have a 2nd or 3rd one open.  Part of the reason for this is that my editor of choice (vim) is a command line tool .

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I might be more inclined to use the command prompt if I had ever been properly taught how to use it. However my experience with it on Windows and Mac has been entirely "type in these exact characters to do this one thing", and those things have always been things I hardly ever need to do. (On the other hand, once upon a time I had memorized how to access a list of files on a floppy disc and run a program on the Commodore 64, though that was about all I could do.)

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If you started programming before the wide spread use of GUI you would use the command line a lot more.  While I don't write scripts daily, I do use them daily.

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So, the laptop is ordered. I went with Windows 11; if after getting the hang of that I'm not satisfied with it or I feel adventurous, I'll try out Linux with the goal of eventually setting up the laptop to dual-boot. (Alternately, if I can get my old laptop running again or otherwise can get my hands on an old-but-functional laptop, I might just set up the older laptop with Linux. But that's a decision for later.)

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Early impressions of Windows 11:

I don't know if I'm less flexible these days or the differences are really greater, but it felt much more jarring going from Windows 8.1 to 11 than it did a decade ago going from Mac OSX to Windows 8. That said, after a couple days working with it (mostly setting it up and playing around with settings) I'm starting to get used to it, and it seems decent enough. (On the other hand, most of the other software the laptop came with is disappointing at best, and outright junk in many cases.)

I have two problems with it. One is a bug that might be a problem with drivers or a conflict with the included software rather than Windows itself: when I leave it sleeping for more than a few minutes, when it wakes up all my programs have closed (which rather defeats the purpose of sleep mode). Thankfully this doesn't happen if I tell it to hibernate instead, so until I find a solution I can use that as a workaround.

The other is that I miss how in 8.1's Start Menu you could group pinned items to better organize them. It looks like Start11 adds that functionality back in (thanks for the suggestion, @ProfessorTomoe), so I'll have to check that out.

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23 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

The other is that I miss how in 8.1's Start Menu you could group pinned items to better organize them. It looks like Start11 adds that functionality back in (thanks for the suggestion, @ProfessorTomoe), so I'll have to check that out.

De nada.

I use one other piece of software by Stardock, called Fences:

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

It lets you organize your desktop more efficiently. I would suggest you investigate it as well, if you think it might help.

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

De nada.

I use one other piece of software by Stardock, called Fences:

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

It lets you organize your desktop more efficiently. I would suggest you investigate it as well, if you think it might help.

My problem with that kind of OS add-on for Windows is that they usually break when Windows upgrades.

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Oh, I forgot another thing about Windows 11 that annoys me: The "Settings" app at first glance seems to offer access to all the settings for Windows, though exploring it, it quickly becomes apparent it's fairly limited. It turns out there's plenty of other settings that you have to go looking for (many of them are still accessed from the old "Control Panel", but that's fairly well hidden now). I wish they had either actually consolidated all the settings in one place, or made it more clear that Settings only has the basics.

4 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I use one other piece of software by Stardock, called Fences:

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

It lets you organize your desktop more efficiently. I would suggest you investigate it as well, if you think it might help.

It looks interesting, but usually if I have enough files on my desktop to need organizing, I figure that's too many and find somewhere else to move them to.

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22 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

I have two problems with it. One is a bug that might be a problem with drivers or a conflict with the included software rather than Windows itself: when I leave it sleeping for more than a few minutes, when it wakes up all my programs have closed (which rather defeats the purpose of sleep mode). Thankfully this doesn't happen if I tell it to hibernate instead, so until I find a solution I can use that as a workaround.

I seem to have figured out what triggers that bug: a setting (on by default) that causes the keyboard backlight to flash when in sleep mode. I didn't like that feature anyway, so no loss there.

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11 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

keyboard backlight to flash

There's your bug.  Keyboards shouldn't have lights other than cap-lock and num-lock.

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Well, it is nice to be able to see the keys when using it in a dark room (though on the other hand I try to have a light on when using my computer, and I can touch type). Anyway, finding a laptop I liked and could afford was hard enough without ruling out laptops that had unnecessary features.

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