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No more Windows here, all Linux

Brian Hall

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I just replaced Windows 10 on my old Surface Pro 3 with Linux Mint. Everything is working except for automatic screen rotation which I don't care about.

The installation was very easy and this tablet PC from 2014 runs like new. Linux is much faster than Windows 10.
 
Hi!

I'm on that side for over 20 years and quite a lot of things still need to be polished there.

Check if everything you need works, then go to updates/software sources settings and make sure security updates are enabled and other 'proposed' or 'recommended' updates are off.
 
Changed to latest Mint to leave Windows behind at our house, no problems so far. It's fast, and less hard drive space. I even found a version (xfce) that works with an older HP cheapie laptop with only 4gb RAM and a 32gb SSD drive. Was pleased to not have to buy new towers just to fulfill Won 11 security requirements.
 
Check if everything you need works, then go to updates/software sources settings and make sure security updates are enabled and other 'proposed' or 'recommended' updates are off.
Why? I'm running Mint Xfce for many years on many machines and always have all (automated) updates enabled and there never ever were any issues. Theoretically, it might happen that keeping an install continuously updated could break the system but that never happened so far, neither to me nor to other users in my circles.
 
Changed to latest Mint to leave Windows behind at our house, no problems so far. It's fast, and less hard drive space. I even found a version (xfce) that works with an older HP cheapie laptop with only 4gb RAM and a 32gb SSD drive. Was pleased to not have to buy new towers just to fulfill Won 11 security requirements.
Yep. IME, Mint Xfce runs fine on older hardware like 10...15 years old where any modern Windows would just choke.
Enough RAM and an SSD always help and that is the only thing I do upgrade if it makes sense, economically. One example is a Lenovo ThinkPad E130, with 6GB RAM and an SSD this is a fully usable laptop with excellent overall quality, for standard office and internet browsing duty.
 
I decided to use this Surface Pro for a while today. I'm surprised at how well Linux Mint performs on this Surface Pro tablet pc from 2014.

Took a performance monitor screenshot while running the Chrome browser and the native Spotify app. I'm glad Microsoft decided to stop supporting their own hardware with Windows. Linux still supports it.

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The headphone jack on the docking unit puts out way more power than expected. Listening with my Arya Stealth headphones and I had to turn the volume down to 50% to keep from deafening myself.
 
For years I have run Linux Mint Cinnamon on old comuters I retired from workstation use at work. First it was a Core 2 duo system I built in 2008, then a Core i7 3770k system I built in 2012. It always has ran great and made the computers feel new again. Now that I am retired Linux Mint is my daily driver. My current system is a Ryzen 9 7950X, which turned out to be pretty much overkill. Even when heavily multitasking the CPU usage never breaks into the double digits.
 
Without actually knowing what I'm doing, I have Zorin, Ubuntu, and Manjaro on my desktop! Did in fact "record" over Windows whilst downloading them. Not concerned about that!
 
Yep. IME, Mint Xfce runs fine on older hardware like 10...15 years old where any modern Windows would just choke.
Enough RAM and an SSD always help and that is the only thing I do upgrade if it makes sense, economically. One example is a Lenovo ThinkPad E130, with 6GB RAM and an SSD this is a fully usable laptop with excellent overall quality, for standard office and internet browsing duty.

The PC I replaced last year was about 10 years old and was still happily running KDE (the eye candy desktop environment ;)).

Xfce's low hardware requirements are definitely marvellous, but if someone does not like the minimalism I'd recommend giving KDE or Gnome a try, they aren't that fat these days. It might be confusing to newcomers, but I'v always enjoyed the choice of desktops I have on Linux!

Oh, and I only replaced the PC mentioned above because it had been developing a few glitches, like the occasional reboot when I plugged in a USB device or without any cause at all...
 
I just replaced Windows 10 on my old Surface Pro 3 with Linux Mint. Everything is working except for automatic screen rotation which I don't care about.

The installation was very easy and this tablet PC from 2014 runs like new. Linux is much faster than Windows 10.
Hi,

Check https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface and see if this fix screen rotation.
 
After a whole life and a lot of pc parts as a tech nerd, linux was the next step. What I did not know or do not know comes from AI. What a relief against Windows, Linux (Mint) is now a days. No more Windows in the house.
 
I did just think that I was booting into Pop OS from one of my flash drives. It started whinging about the wrong Nvidia version, so I gave up!
 
I did just think that I was booting into Pop OS from one of my flash drives. It started whinging about the wrong Nvidia version, so I gave up!
I wouldn't sweat it. In my opinion the desktop environment is more important than the distro. I'm partial to KDE Plasma and Cinnamon, but desktop environment choice is more about personal preference than anything else now days. Some may use slightly less RAM, but I have tested many of them and did not see a difference in responsiveness, even on the computer I built 18 years ago. Sure, it's measureable, but I'm not confident it really is noticable - kind of analogous to comparing a SINAD of 120dB to a SINAD of 100dB.

I tried out Pop_OS! with its new Cosmic desktop, which was completely re-programmed in Rust. It looks very promising but, still, its feature set still is growing and there are some bugs being worked out. It's not the point where I would use it as a daily driver, but for some people it may be fine.
 
Can I ask the total newb question?

I'm retiring and would like to kick my windows habit.

I have lots of Microsoft Word documents, some excel sheets, many pdfs. I want to keep working on them. I want to be able to collaborate with other people who are still working in Windows environments. In particular opening, editing, and sending back .docx files. How hard would that be?
 
I did just think that I was booting into Pop OS from one of my flash drives. It started whinging about the wrong Nvidia version, so I gave up!
There's a reason why this famously happened back in 2012:
Go back to 48:14 for the start of the question that sparked it, and the earlier part of the answer. It's arguable whether things have improved since then - just when it looks like things are improving there'll be a setback. The best experience is probably with cards new enough to be supported by nvidia's current closed drivers, and a distro that they support.
 
Can I ask the total newb question?

I'm retiring and would like to kick my windows habit.

I have lots of Microsoft Word documents, some excel sheets, many pdfs. I want to keep working on them. I want to be able to collaborate with other people who are still working in Windows environments. In particular opening, editing, and sending back .docx files. How hard would that be?
Not hard. Use the LibreOffice suite (free).
 
Can I ask the total newb question?

I'm retiring and would like to kick my windows habit.

I have lots of Microsoft Word documents, some excel sheets, many pdfs. I want to keep working on them. I want to be able to collaborate with other people who are still working in Windows environments. In particular opening, editing, and sending back .docx files. How hard would that be?
While you've still got Windows, give LibreOffice a try and see how you get on moving files back and forward between it and Office. In my experience it's pretty good but not perfect, and for some features it can go very wrong - but they may not be features you care about. If it's not good enough you could subscribe to the web version of Office. Given that even MS can't get opening some old Office docs right in more recent versions of Office than it was saved in, I'm willing to cut LibreOffice some slack - occasionally it does a better job than MS!

PDF is better standardised, so is pretty well supported by multiple applications - so long as you're not using the latest features.
 
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