There are more than a billion PCs in use and, according to StatCounter, only 71 percent of them run Windows. Among the rest, about 4 percent run Linux. That’s tens of millions of people with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc as their desktop operating system. I envy them.
Windows 11 has become more annoying lately as it shoves ads for XBox Game Pass in my face, pushes AI features no one asked for and demands that I reconsider the choices I made during installation on a regular basis. Plus, it just isn’t that attractive.
I’m ready to try joining that industrious four percent and installing Linux on my computers to use as my main OS, at least for a week. I’ll blog about the experience here.
It’s hard to give up Windows forever because so many applications only run in Microsoft’s OS. For example, the peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice isn’t available for Linux. Lots of games will not run under Linux. So I think it’s likely I’ll be using Windows again, at least some of the time, after this week is through.
However, for now, I’m going to give Linux a very serious audition and document the experience.
I dont think the criticism of installing apps is valid. Windows also has many ways of installing things. He criticizes the app center as if you can install everything from the microsoft store. On windows you still install stuff from a website, and you can use a package manager too it just isn’t a requirement.
How to install software on Windows (that I know of):
- EXE installer that you download from the website (Linux equivalent to a binary installer that you downlaod)
- MSI installer that you downlaod from the website (Linux equivalent to a .deb package I would say?)
- Zip executable installer that you download from the website (Binary installer again?)
- Standalone Zip that you download from the website (Standalone zip or tar file)
- Microsoft Store (App store)
- Chocolatey (Apt/Yum, etc)
- Winget (Apt/Yum, etc)
There’s not sandboxed applications like Flatpaks or Snaps though, which provide an extra layer of security. Which would be great in Windows, honestly.
Ubuntu is such a weird beast IMO. As someone who mostly uses Windows but works a lot in Linux, I’ve always instead recommended Linux Mint to people who are switching from Windows. it feels a lot less quirky and hand-holdy. TBF it’s been quite a while since I’ve tried a fresh install of Ubuntu, but the last time I did it really reminded me of Windows 8 or Windows Mobile. Way too much like a phone OS out of the box.
Linux Mint feels quirky to me. It’s an Ubuntu flavor, but not quite? Because it gets rid of a few Ubuntu things.
OBS Studio: There’s a community version but no official version of OBS for Linux.
This is incorrect, right? Im assuming had to install it somewhere else and presumed it wasnt official.