[ShadowAce]

Linux is NOT Windows

[BipolarBob]

I switched to Linux because Windows kept getting s-l-o-w-e-r and slower over time no matter what I did. It was inevitable. Linux is still as fast as the day it was installed years later. I’m no techie and I do have problems with it from time to time but I get by.

[The Louiswu]

I put a solid state HD in my 2014 Mac Book Pro and it runs like lightning and shows no signs of decline.

[bigbob]

Like asking for a hot young new wife but the same old nasty mother-in-law.

[discostu]

I think he’s missing what people are really looking for. The biggest thing that people, especially non-techie people, like about Windows is that you don’t have to mess with it. A default install of Windows will 95% of what people want without the person ever having to dig into the guts and configure stuff they’ve never heard of. They don’t want an OS to be passionate about, they just want to click icons and run software.

It’s like the car world. Whenever I got a car my brother-in-law would ask me all these car nerd questions, what’s the engine size, what’s the horse power, all this blah blah. But I’m not a car guy, I don’t care about any of that stuff. I could tell you the seat is comfortable, I’m happy with the handling and acceleration, and about the stereo, cause I’m a music guy. People who want a “Windows like” experience have the same relationship with their OS I have with my car. They just want to turn the key and go.

[Openurmind]

While this is a good outlook, don’t “expect” Linux to be windows. Linux Mint Cinnamon actually does “mimic” Windows 7 and is as close as you can get. But don’t expect it to be exactly like windows and have all the exact same features because it is not and will not.

[monkeyshine]

Can I edit videos and images on Linux? Can you docusign on Linux? Email clients I’m sure must exist but what else? Anything as “good” as Excel or Access that isn’t cloud based? Will it sync messages with an iPhone? Can it run windows apps (I’m guessing not, or not well without some kind of emulation software). I’m not being a jerk - serious questions. I use app for all the above applications how or why should I switch? Most people who use those types of apps chose IOS. I find it confusing. iOS buttons are backwards or something.

[dagunk]

Switched wifey-dear from windows to Linux Mint. She does Firefox and recipes. She can get to both with no problems. Retraining was “This doohickey starts Firefox, this doohickey starts the file manager and here’s your recipes”.

She is completely non-technical.

However - I got home from work one day and found sitting in her office watching Gunsmoke on her computer. Her only complaint was she had to wiggle the mouse to keep the picture up. I set the screensaver to two hours.
I’m pretty sure I do NOT want to know how she figured that out.

[McGruff]

I don’t agree. I’ve tried some Linux distributions that are pretty close but I’m still sticking with Windows for now because of a game I play.

[asinclair]

My switch-to-Linux story is, um, a little different. I was writing a book with a co-author. The first thing is that we were doing the work on a shoe-string. The exchange of text was done over a network, instead of using "sneakernet" with floppy disks. (This sets the era for the story.) The medium of exchange was a computer, purchased at a flea market, and loaded with a server version of Linux and running Samba, a Windows file sharing lookalike. Us authors were running Windows and using Microsoft Word. The use of the server (a cheap Dell computer running Red Hat 5) permitted both easy exchange, and implicit backup of our work. That sets the scene.

I'm banging away on creating the text, when my Windows computer decided to show The Blue Screen of Death (tm). Reload and recover the last two hours of work, no huhu. Until it happened for the third time. The deadline for submitting the manuscript was a firmly fixed one, and the computer problems were messing up meeting the project goals. (Fun fact, I was using MacProject to track this.)

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result. My reaction to the third crash was to re-evaluate, and do something different. Enter the Linux desktop system, with LibreOffice. No more Blue Screens. I finished the manuscript, and shipped it off to the publisher.

I never looked back.

My transition was a little unusual, because I was already familiar with Linux as a server: mail server, file server, and firewall. Moving to having Linux as my desktop machine involved a learning curve, and discovering software to replace all the Windows-ware that I was using at the time.

What do I use today? Ubuntu on my desktop. Mint in my laptops. Everything I used to do on Windows has been replicated in the Linux environment. It's not perfect, but good enough to earn money and get projects done.

What I "miss" most is Microsoft's we-know-best attitude toward computer usage. Recall. Co-pilot. The damn registry. Mandatory registration of a Microsoft account.

[isthisnickcool]

Circa 1990—-

Me: You are building a unix clone?

Linus: Yes

[dayglored]

Hi ShadowAce,

What an odd article. You would think by now people who are even the least bit interested in computers (as opposed to mobiles for selfies and TikTok) would know that:

• If you are non-technical, and all you do on the computer is run a browser and maybe an email client, then you will find that Linux and Windows are essentially the same except for some minor UI differences.

• But if you are technical, and your work on the computer involves a command-line shell, writing software, managing other computers, etc., then Linux and Windows are radically different, and require very different mindsets to operate effectively in both environments.

I am very technical, and operate in THREE environments: Linux, Windows, and MacOS, all day and evening long, at work and at home. No big deal -- You get used to switching mindsets, and it eventually becomes almost seamless, even doing highly technical work. Humans are adaptive creatures.

For your average non-technical Windows user, who is thinking about trying Linux or switching to it, probably 90% will only notice some superficial UI differences, and otherwise if it runs their browser they won't care.

[Myrddin]

I was an HDOS and CP/M user in 1980. The chief architect of HDOS was hired away to Microsoft. The concept of tree structured filesystems and mountable devices was instilled into MSDOS as a consequence. UNIX at PacBell on the 3B20/S was my daily driver by 1983. All command line on VT100 terminals. It was a development environment. Shells, C and C++. Yup...a perk of being inside the Bell System. Primitive, but useful. Xenix arrived at home in 1983 then the office in later 1984. HP-UX and SCO Xenix at the office. UNIX-1100 on the UNISYS 11/92 mainframe. It was 1985 before I saw the first Windows on a PC. I started attending UseNIX to meet others in the UNIX industry. Linus Torvalds was just starting to experiment with operating systems derived from books published by Tannenbaum. Minix. It was a long road with much collaboration as Linus fashioned his new OS after the pattern of UNIX. I tried his stuff out in 1991. It was a nice start. The advent of the GNU C compiler from Richard Stallman around 1985 was a big step forward. C language with prototype headers. Lots of defects were detected and corrected with the more strict compiler. That was a big win for Linus and the Linux collaboration community.

Linux and UNIX are commodity operating systems now. Excellent for the server side. Linux with X Windows derived GUI interfaces is great and convenient. Not fully as functional as Windows. As a long time UNIX/Linux developer, I prefer Windows as my desktop machine and UNIX/Linux as my backend server environment. Tools suited for a specific purpose.

[aquila48]

What a pile of useless crap.

The guy has no appreciation for the concept of “user friendly” and “intuitive”.

He seems to take joy out of going back to using command lines interface.

It’s torture and only the ultra geek get off on it. 99% of the people could care less about the OS. It’s the functionality and ease of use of the apps they interact with daily that matters.

And there are some very Windows like Linux distros that are quite good. I use Mint, and I have a hard time noticing the differences, except when I shut down and reboot, Mint is much faster.

[martin_fierro]

[Carry_Okie]

The biggest—and really the only—thing you need to make the switch successfully is a willingness to change your mindset. With that, you’re in for a fun and inspiring journey into the world of Linux. But if you’re just expecting a Windows-like experience, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment because Linux just works differently.

To be frank, this is a load of tripe. My issues with transitioning from Windows to Linux are all about performance. I have a HUGE investment made in producing PowerPoint files published in pdf. The "picture book" about our property is some 2,300pp. The second book I wrote and published on CD is some 750pp. The latter is heavily graphical with images on 75% of the pages.

Linux pdf publications, so far, do unacceptable things to my fonts, background colors, and puts lines around image segments, that end up cutting across the photographs (at least that's how they show up in Ubuntu). Yes, those lines correspond to what Adobe did partitioning those images, but the consequences of the transition are unacceptable to me graphically. Adobe does not produce Acrobat for Linux.

This doesn't even approach the problems I've had translating my 14GB Outlook.pst file to Thunderbird so that I can even contemplate a functional transition. So effectively, Linux has me locked out from making ANY transition, and I've wasted (so far) a lot of time trying.

I was writing 6800 microcode in hexadecimal back in the 80s. I wrote all my web sites in straight HTML code on the Notepad back in 2001 and transitioned to CSS in 2010. I don't need this kind of condescension. I need performance.

[CodeToad]

Microsoft being an Indian company now has been making seriously poor product and design choices to the point using Microsoft products has become detrimental to intellectual property protections. That, and they are losing quality of any remaining quality. Simple updates break critical functionality.

[for-q-clinton]

Article lost me right here: “So, you’ve decided to make the switch from Windows to Linux—first off, hats off to you!”

Why is it good for you? Meaning it depends on why you’re switching before saying “hats off to you!”.

If you’re switching because you want more control over your computer. Great. If you’re switching because you want an easier experience...damn you just screwed up.

[Organic Panic]

Most people couldn’t tell a difference between Ubuntu and Windows. At my stage in life I stick with Windows. But mostly because all the software I use only runs on windows.

[daniel1212]

These distros usually come with a clean and familiar user interface: a bottom panel with a list of open apps, a Start menu, and other elements that long-time Windows users will instantly recognize. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that—in fact, it’s pretty cool.

Except that for some reason developers think a "Start menu" should be one of spaced out icons (looking at MS default especially) and lacking expanding menus which enable quick efficient access to the tools and places you want.

And lacking the ability to right click on an icon shortcut and quickly go to its location. Or send such shortcut to the "Send to" (buried in Windows) to add the list of locations or apps that you may want to send a file to. As well as so do with right click menus (composite).

And when you cannot enable two rows on the "task bar" (as per MS "update" removal, and most Linux distros).

Linux is not Windows! Never has been, never will be.

But it should not be averse to being like Windows if there it would provide a positive improvement. I have no found that Linux distros can now easily enable the customization I want and obtain in Windows, or that "equivalents" are all as good, but thank God for browsers and word pros that equally work on both. And that we can allow disagreement.

What I’m trying to say is that these Windows-like Linux distributions are basically selling you a “package”—one that plays on the anxiety you might feel about stepping outside your comfort zone when exploring something new (and amazing) like Linux...the real beauty, flexibility, power, and freedom of Linux has never been about the packaging. It’s all about what’s under the hood and what you can do with it.

Actually, as I have said before, you need to step outside a comfort zone to enhance Windows and enable it to be far more efficient and aesthetically improved, which I find can be more easily and safely freely done in Windows (even if it means reverting aspects of the W/11 shell to W/10*) which for me would take far more time to enable with Linux than is warranted. A least presently.

Linux isn’t usually built to give you a perfect, polished user experience right out of the box.

Neither is Windows, unless you are content with the defaults.

I hope it’s becoming clear that there is no such thing as “Linux for Windows users.”

But there could be, but which means improving both.

However, while I offer constructive criticism in the interest of making capable and beneficial systems better, as one in need of much improvement myself, I thank God for the tools we have, at little software cost (I only paid $28 for an upgrade to W/8, on the Retail channel, which led to W/11 Pro via free upgrades), which I want to use for what is good in the eyes of God.

My old home built PC runs Mint daily, while an old donates PC rdult boots W/10 with PC Linux OS (KDE plasma) which I found to be the best distro myself, though it has seen little use by me, and I do not employ proprietary codecs TMK.

Thank God for options.

*https://www.quora.com/Why-should-Windows-be-loved-over-Linux/answer