If you (like many) are worried about the “end-of-life” announcement about Windows 10 (or earlier versions), but cannot upgrade to the newest Windows due to supposed issues with your older hardware, I’d recommend watching this video to get the REAL story behind it all.
In summary, your hardware is likely fine. It just lacks the “chip” required for Microsoft to completely take over your computer and basically spy on you 24/7, logging your photos, files, keyboard strokes, websites visited, and physical location as you go about your day – all to enable their AI induced utopia.
Microsoft will claim (of course) that their new operating system is more secure, faster and eliminates many of the threats present today, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Down here on the farm, I have embarked on a journey to rid ourselves of Microsoft and is so far going well, with my primary office desktop PC now running (much faster and more stable) on Linux. The Linux distro has pretty much everything we need and for those very few apps that need to run on Windows, the dual boot option can return to Windows in those rare instances when needed until Linux alternatives are identified.
For our journey, I selected Linux Mint as our best option. My UNIX coding expertise is nearly 20 years old now – and was never very good to begin with. The other reason is not everyone spent their past “coding in the basement”, and I wanted something that Sherry could seamlessly switch to without too much trouble.
With 2 devices now switched over, here are the pros and cons.
PROS
- Of the many Linux “distros”, Mint seems to be the friendliest to novices and has many of the features for complete computing built right in, without needing to purchase additional software for office apps, security (virus protection of VPNs) and most all of your computing needs.
- I am installing Mint parallel to the existing Windows install with the dual boot option so if you absolutely need to run Windows, it is still there and simply can be chosen from the boot menu at startup.
- All of your existing files and folders remain intact and can be accessed via Mint from the Windows partition.
- So far, Mint has been running flawlessly. It seems much faster and is certainly more stable than Windows ever was.
CONS:
- Probably the biggest issue I am having is getting certain apps (written for Windows but not Linux) to run. There are a number of “tools” (Wine/Bottles/and others) to allow this but none seem to do the job completely so will need to boot back into Windows to use those apps. But those instances are now extremely rare, as most everything is done via a web browser. Also, many apps offer a Linux installation so you don’t need Windows at all and for those that require it, there are plenty of Linux friendly alternatives.
- As user friendly as Linux Mint is, I still had to recall some of those long forgotten IT skills from my former life and guessing those without that history will have their eyes glaze over as some dude who has never left his parents basement explain how easy it is.
- Related to that, out of the box they claim Mint automatically enables the dual boot option needed to revert/run the Windows OS but so far, in my case this has never worked and I had to tweak the grub (boot) files to get it working as they claimed.
I still have 3 or 4 more desktops, as well as Sherry’s laptop and 3 of my own to convert but am finding each conversion easier as I progress through it. I am even contemplating offering conversion services for the rural folks down here where money is extremely tight and IT skills are few and far between.
I’ll complete my conversion and work out the bugs before I hang that shingle out however. By then, it will be long overdue to also escape Google – Gmail (ugghh!), YouTube, GoogleOne, Drive and the rest of their empire, along with Gemini, their AI utopia flavor.
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