[[Installed Linux Mint on an older retired machine for trial and was impressed with the performance.]]
Yup- i dual boot linux mint and windows 7- linux mint hardly ever causes my vid card to sound like it’s going to rattle apart- but when i fire up windows- it taxes the card something fierce some times- running linux mint is a nice quiet experience- especially with an SDD- runs a lot cooler too- Wish i had switched years ago really- and just kept windows for some windows only programs like photoshop- to use OFFLINE only
That’s pretty much what I’m doing too. Gimp replaces Photoshop and LibreOffice replaces MS Office. Gimp and LibreOffice come installed with the new Zorin (Linux) OS. My laserjet printer is on my home network hard wired in with RJ45. All I had to do to set it up in Zorin was bring up the printer window and with one click on “Add Printer” it found the network printer, loaded the drivers, and made it my default printer with no other input from me. It’s not difficult in Windows either but the point is Linux and its different distro’s sure have come a long way from using all the command line language from just 10 years ago. The CPU runs cooler because it isn’t busy with a bunch of useless commands from the OS all the time in Linux too giving the user more CPU time which also makes the machine more efficient and faster.
I still have to close the Firefox browser once in a while because FF doesn’t like to give up memory sometimes so closing and reopening it clears it from memory. Linux uses memory much more efficiently too. If I’m using half my available memory in Windows it starts to get more sluggish. In Linux it just keeps plugging along even at 3/4 memory use. I haven’t tried to go beyond that yet but will just to see what happens.
Linux really is a win, win, win nowadays. There’s very few reasons to run Windows any longer and no reasons for me.
I added the extra info for other readers because I know you know all this stuff already.