Seriously consider moving to Linux

[balloonshark]

Thank you both for your helpful suggestions. Your suggestions are lining up with my hasty research. I think I'm going go with the i5-4670 - HD7950 setup. My non-techie niece and her 3 children under 7 years old may end up with this PC.

Fallen Kell: What are your thoughts on Zorin OS and Mint versus PopOS for this older system? I'm kind of leaning toward Bazzite because it seems reliable and simple.

 

[WelshBloke]

Thank you both for your helpful suggestions. Your suggestions are lining up with my hasty research. I think I'm going go with the i5-4670 - HD7950 setup. My non-techie niece and her 3 children under 7 years old may end up with this PC.

Fallen Kell: What are your thoughts on Zorin OS and Mint versus PopOS for this older system? I'm kind of leaning toward Bazzite because it seems reliable and simple.

Depending on how old things are Mint is always a safe bet. Zorin looks nicer and it's very much "Windows but not" so that works for a straight swap.

 

[misuspita]

I installed Zorin on one of the laptops and it's great, very windowsy and easy to work with. I'll try Bazzite next on the kid's PC, but I am rather not having time or mood to do it so I crawl with Win11 on the others until I find both 🙂

 

[mikeymikec]

Besides Ubuntu's UI, isn't pretty much every Linux distro "very Windowsy" in look and feel?

 

[misuspita]

I don't know, I haven't tried anything else now, only Mint around 2 years ago, but I think Mint wasn't as smooth of a change, Zorin I only had to search for how to make the Start button work the same as in W land and I did it in 2 minutes, everything else was pretty intuitive. The laptop is a newish one, a AMD 8845 OLED Lenovo Yoga, all drivers were instantly recognized, even the touchscreen, a better experience than in Windows

 

[lxskllr]

Besides Ubuntu's UI, isn't pretty much every Linux distro "very Windowsy" in look and feel?

I think zorin aims to be a sort of clone of windows, where it *very much* looks like windows. I have mixed feelings on that. First is there's better desktops than windows, while still keeping the "classic" paradigm. Second, is I think it's geared towards linux "n00bs", with the idea that keeping in familiar territory will make it easier.

The first is a matter of taste. People like what they like. The second is where I have the most problem. People that know little will be geared up to expect windows and windows behavior, but no matter what skin you put on it, *nix will never be windows. It can lead to frustration and the feeling you got the 'dollar store' windows where nothing works quite right. Something different enforces the idea that you're using something different, and knowledge will have to be gained, and behavior adjusted to the new o/s.

 

[mikeymikec]

The second is where I have the most problem. People that know little will be geared up to expect windows and windows behavior, but no matter what skin you put on it, *nix will never be windows. It can lead to frustration and the feeling you got the 'dollar store' windows where nothing works quite right. Something different enforces the idea that you're using something different, and knowledge will have to be gained, and behavior adjusted to the new o/s.

Absolutely.

I took one look at Zorin recently and I knew that a tonne of my customers would say "not Windowsy enough". If you're wanting to change away from Windows then pretty much by definition you want something different... not that there's any realistic expectation of Windows "staying the same" these days, especially with the idiotic new Start menu that's been rolled out to maybe a quarter of Win11 PCs that is even less customisable than its predecessors.

 

[EXCellR8]

I've got Zorin OS on a less powerful ASUS notebook and I don't mind it. Supposedly much lighter than Ubuntu and aesthetically it's a no-frills desktop UI. Normally I'd install Xubuntu as my go-to, but wanted to give Zorin a whirl. It's fine...

I am also still gaming with Bazzite on the one spare PC, which seems to be holding up pretty well. It doesn't have the grunt to run anything too demanding, but it's fantastic for the backlog or replay of favorites via Steam. I was recently playing Metro LL Redux on there, and there were only a few segments where the framerate dropped a bit. Otherwise, great experience. I'm not the biggest KDE Plasma fan, but it's grown on me some.

 

[misuspita]

These days with the help of chat bots is easier to find out stuff that would have taken a lot of trial and fuckups 10 years ago... I like that zorin tries to keep things as close as possible to windows to attract immigrants, but then, after you're ok with stuff, can venture to try other less Windowsy stuff.

I mean, people are too entranched, android world, apple world, windows world, etc...

 

[WelshBloke]

You can change the way Zorin looks with a couple of mouse clicks. So start off with Windows if you like them you can change it up to a more Gnome centric look.

That's pretty much what I did. After I got rid of the windows like start menu and had the gnome overview window it became a lot more comfortable.

Tbh for most people the OS is just an app launcher. If there's a desktop with icons on they can click on they'll be happy as long as everything else works.

 

[manly]

I've been putting it off for eons, but finally upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (from 22.04).
The upgrader failed at the very end, ominously giving up.

>> Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a)

The dist-upgrade logs were not helpful, but I decided that the upgrade was successful regardless. Worst case, I could do some kind of reinstall. Luckily, it rebooted normally and the only thing currently broken is audio. Some weird bug that surfaced a few years back.

Fixing No Sound (Dummy Output) Issue in Ubuntu 24.04

After updating my Ubuntu to version 24.04, my desktop PC (Gigabyte H510M-K DDR4) can't detect audio drivers. Headphones work, but external speakers are not recognized. ~$ aplay -l **** List of PLAY...

askubuntu.com

2026-03-09 15:29:05,374 ERROR Exception during pm.DoInstall()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-3gtmg4ew/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py", line 220, in run
res = pm.do_install(self.writefd)
apt_pkg.Error: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR SystemError from cache.commit(): installArchives() failed
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR found exception: 'E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,877 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,889 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (g-io-error-quark: Failed to execute child process “./xorg_fix_proprietary.py”: Failed to execve: No such file or directory (1))
2026-03-09 15:31:19,890 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: '/usr/lib/ubuntu-advantage/convert_list_to_deb822.py'

 

[Zepp]

I've been putting it off for eons, but finally upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (from 22.04).
The upgrader failed at the very end, ominously giving up.



The dist-upgrade logs were not helpful, but I decided that the upgrade was successful regardless. Worst case, I could do some kind of reinstall. Luckily, it rebooted normally and the only thing currently broken is audio. Some weird bug that surfaced a few years back.

Fixing No Sound (Dummy Output) Issue in Ubuntu 24.04

After updating my Ubuntu to version 24.04, my desktop PC (Gigabyte H510M-K DDR4) can't detect audio drivers. Headphones work, but external speakers are not recognized. ~$ aplay -l **** List of PLAY...

askubuntu.com

2026-03-09 15:29:05,374 ERROR Exception during pm.DoInstall()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-3gtmg4ew/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py", line 220, in run
res = pm.do_install(self.writefd)
apt_pkg.Error: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR SystemError from cache.commit(): installArchives() failed
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR found exception: 'E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,877 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,889 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (g-io-error-quark: Failed to execute child process “./xorg_fix_proprietary.py”: Failed to execve: No such file or directory (1))
2026-03-09 15:31:19,890 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: '/usr/lib/ubuntu-advantage/convert_list_to_deb822.py'

out of curiosity I pasted this to chatgpt and it said it looks like a package failed to configure or install properly during the upgrade, it suggested repair broken packages and fix dependencies

might be a relatively simple fix

 

[manly]

out of curiosity I pasted this to chatgpt and it said it looks like a package failed to configure or install properly during the upgrade, it suggested repair broken packages and fix dependencies

might be a relatively simple fix

Thanks! I had noticed during the package installations that Thunderbird was now a snap, but the configuration failed. Not too motivated to fix this as I only have some archival email in Tbird. It was a little disappointing that the Ubuntu upgrader simply gave up, esp. if the root cause was a failed application transition.


2026-03-09 15:11:55,260 ERROR got an error from dpkg for pkg: 'thunderbird-local
e-en': 'dependency problems - leaving unconfigured'
2026-03-09 15:12:06,244 ERROR got an error from dpkg for pkg: 'thunderbird-local
e-en-us': 'dependency problems - leaving unconfigured'

 

[mikeymikec]

Is snap the one that's as slow as balls or is that flatpak? I have trouble keeping track.

 

[lxskllr]

Snap is the one I hear the bitching about. I'm not really interested in any of the prepackaged formats though. Flatpack comes just before 'compile from source' on my desirability list. So far I don't need any of them.

 

[manly]

Is snap the one that's as slow as balls or is that flatpak? I have trouble keeping track.

Canonical has been pushing Snap hard for over 5 years. It's led to some users ditching them completely, despite Ubuntu being the de facto standard desktop Linux for a long time. App launch times can be "slow as balls," but I don't really notice ongoing problems. They push more of the OS stack into snaps, which seems to accumulate "cruft" over time:

$ snap list
Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes
core 16-2.61.4-20250910 17272 latest/stable canonical✓ core
core18 20260204 2999 latest/stable canonical✓ base
core20 20260105 2717 latest/stable canonical✓ base
core22 20260113 2292 latest/stable canonical✓ base
core24 20260211 1499 latest/stable canonical✓ base
gnome-3-26-1604 3.26.0.20221130 111 latest/stable/… canonical✓ -
gnome-3-28-1804 3.28.0-19-g98f9e67.98f9e67 198 latest/stable canonical✓ -
gnome-3-34-1804 0+git.3556cb3 93 latest/stable canonical✓ -
gnome-3-38-2004 0+git.efb213a 143 latest/stable canonical✓ -
gnome-42-2204 0+git.c1d3d69-sdk0+git.015db9a 247 latest/stable canonical✓ -
gnome-46-2404 0+git.f1cd5fa-sdk0+git.ca9c59c 153 latest/stable canonical✓


Flatpak has its use cases, so it's not useless. Makes sense for updating web browsers, and I believe Handbrake chooses to push its releases that way too.

 

[Steltek]

Canonical has increased the minimum system requirements for Ubuntu Linux. It now has has higher published minimum system hardware requirements than does Windows 11.

 

[Zepp]

Ironically I feel I could almost guarantee ubuntu would feel better to use with 4GB than windows 11 with 6GB

The windows requirement must be assuming you never open a web browser

 

[mikeymikec]

Ironically I feel I could almost guarantee ubuntu would feel better to use with 4GB than windows 11 with 6GB

The windows requirement must be assuming you never open a web browser

Microsoft devs grumble... "What do you mean, 'never open a web browser'? A clean install of Win11 has TWO web browsers running the moment it's started, you just don't want either of those, do you?"

 

[mv2devnull]

Canonical has increased the minimum system requirements for Ubuntu Linux. It now has has higher published minimum system hardware requirements than does Windows 11.

The memory requirement for RHEL is set to be enough for its installer to run. After install a minimal server will not need that much.

RHEL 10 does not even include any browser as "normal" RPM package; one can get Firefox as flatpak (later?).

 

[lxskllr]

It's pretty interesting watching MS implode in slow motion. They dominated desktop computing(the only area of computing they lead in), and all they had to do was make minor improvements, and apply a little polish. Everyone would've been happy, and nobody but geeks would be thinking of linux. MS has been a better evangelist for gnu/linux than RMS or Linus ever were :^D

 

[manly]

Microsoft's market cap is currently $2.85T. Taste aside, they've done well since Steve Ballmer retired. So long as OpenAI doesn't implode, Microsoft holds a huge, valuable stake.

***
Coming soon to a distro near you...

Linux 7.0 Released - Slashdot

"The new Linux kernel was released and it's kind of a big deal," writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. "Here is what you can expect." Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant...

linux.slashdot.org

 

[mikeymikec]

Microsoft's market cap is currently $2.85T. Taste aside, they've done well since Steve Ballmer retired. So long as OpenAI doesn't implode, Microsoft holds a huge, valuable stake.

It's a debt owed by a company that has no credible plan for paying it back. Combine that with Microsoft undermining its core product for the last ten years, I think Microsoft is going to be in a far worse state than Intel has recently reached.

 

[manly]

It's a debt owed by a company that has no credible plan for paying it back. Combine that with Microsoft undermining its core product for the last ten years, I think Microsoft is going to be in a far worse state than Intel has recently reached.

I haven't daily-driven Windows in over 2 decades, so I'm not here to defend MSFT.
However, their net profit in FY2025 was over $100B. The biggest contributor by far is servers/Azure, and a solid #2 is Office. Most guest servers on Azure are running Linux, so in a way their success under Satya Nadella has been from embracing open source. It's not like the old days when they tried to bury the competition, by hook or crook.
Client Windows is about 10% of their business and shrinking.

This doesn't preclude MS becoming the next IBM, and who knows what happens with OpenAI in the future. But my main point is that Microsoft's success isn't dependent on how shitty we think Win11 (or 12+) is.

Although I'm generally skeptical of the AI boom, the whispered revenue run rates of Anthropic and OpenAI are actually staggering (mid $20B annually).

Anthropic may have closed the revenue gap on OpenAI. Here's what it means for their IPOs

The timing is starting to crystallize for a trio of mega-IPOs, and for those hoping to get some liquidity out of other AI companies going public, there may not be enough investor appetite to go around this year.

www.reuters.com

Suffice to say, Intel in 2025 pre-bailout was in a significantly worse position than any reasonable expectations of Microslop. They have a few cash cows that are extremely hard to slaughter and unless they decide to hire Ballmer back as CEO, they'll be fine.

 

[mikeymikec]

I haven't daily-driven Windows in over 2 decades, so I'm not here to defend MSFT.
However, their net profit in FY2025 was over $100B. The biggest contributor by far is servers/Azure, and a solid #2 is Office. Most guest servers on Azure are running Linux, so in a way their success under Satya Nadella has been from embracing open source. It's not like the old days when they tried to bury the competition, by hook or crook.
Client Windows is about 10% of their business and shrinking.

This doesn't preclude MS becoming the next IBM, and who knows what happens with OpenAI in the future. But my main point is that Microsoft's success isn't dependent on how shitty we think Win11 (or 12+) is.

Although I'm generally skeptical of the AI boom, the whispered revenue run rates of Anthropic and OpenAI are actually staggering (mid $20B annually).

Anthropic may have closed the revenue gap on OpenAI. Here's what it means for their IPOs

The timing is starting to crystallize for a trio of mega-IPOs, and for those hoping to get some liquidity out of other AI companies going public, there may not be enough investor appetite to go around this year.

www.reuters.com

Suffice to say, Intel in 2025 pre-bailout was in a significantly worse position than any reasonable expectations of Microslop. They have a few cash cows that are extremely hard to slaughter and unless they decide to hire Ballmer back as CEO, they'll be fine.

I admit fault in that I have helped this topic de-rail, I'll only say that when I describe Windows as Microsoft's core product, I'm not making a statement about its bottom line. If a supermarket stops selling food or if its food offering becomes substandard, it doesn't matter that it has much better profit margins selling say cigarettes, razor blades and alcohol. It risks losing everything because it is not delivering on its core product. Microsoft's core product is Windows. That's what its brand is recognised primarily for, and a heck of a lot of its other products orbit Windows. If Windows loses its hold on the market, Microsoft loses a lot of brand recognition / association, much like IBM once lost its "no-one was ever fired for buying IBM" lustre. If Windows were to *poof* out of existence tomorrow, the company would need to restructure like few large corporations (if any) have restructured before, and change its attitude towards its customers drastically.

I'll concede that I don't know for a fact that a lot of money changed hands in the MS - OpenAI deal, but my bet is that Microsoft handed over many billions of dollars for that stake in OpenAI (because OpenAI needs cash). Assuming that they did, that debt is a massive risk in Microsoft's current volatile state.

I'm happy to continue discussing this in a more relevant thread.