Okay, so if i wanted to convert this laptop to Linux, where should i begin?
And let me start by saying that it’s an HP spectre x360 convertible 13, and it’s valuable to me that i can fold it into a tent and use the touch screen to control a movie as the tent is propped on the little table in front of me airplane seat.
(And I’m really cranky that Netflix won’t let me download movies onto it any more. But YouTube let’s me do that, so it remains useful to watch movies on the plane.)
It’s old enough that i assume all the drivers that will ever become available are available.
I’ll also be wanting a web browser, something to organize and get at my files, a music player (but I’m pretty sure that the specialized music player people use to play square dance tapes has a Linux version, and i can get help with that), and an email client that can handle multiple Gmail accounts and also a non-Gmail imap account.
Oh, and word processor and spreadsheet apps that can read word and Excel files. They don’t need 100% compatibility, though. I’m assuming there’s a version of acrobat reader for Linux.
I would first suggest you to create an installation USB. This is a device that, when plugged into your computer, will boot into a simple “test version” of Linux Mint. From here you can see what it looks like. How it handles. It will not be the full thing, but you can see if all your hardware works.
Next I would suggest, for safety sake, to remove your Windows Hard Drive from your computer and store it somewhere safe. This way, you can always revert back (if you have a “change of Heart”) by just putting the hard drive back into your computer. After removing the old Hard Drive replace it with a new/used Hard Drive/SSD and you should use the Installation USB to install the REAL Linux Mint onto this Hard Drive.
Linux Mint should have all the applications you need, but if it doesn’t you can get them via the Debian Package Manager or other Linux app repositories (we’ll help you out). Does all this seem doable?
(In context of a travel computer) I’d consider ChromeOS or an Android tablet with a dockable keyboard. They are both Linux, but simpler and easier to use than the other distros and you never have to worry about drivers and such. I hate to say it, but corporate Linux is much more user friendly than the fully open source stuff. (And even the corporate Linuxes are still mostly open-source.)
(Of course iPad or MacBook Air are options too… an used M1 Air is an incredible value for travel with amazing battery life and weight and build quality.)
That’s what got me onto macOS a decade ago. Linux on the desktop still wasn’t great then, and WSL wasn’t quite a thing yet. I wanted to use some GNU utils and a bash or zsh shell and life was just so much easier on macOS. grep alone was worth the switch.
I just bought a new gaming desktop, and I will eventually put on a gaming Linux on it, either SteamOS or Bazzite probably. I had a Steam Deck for a few days, and its OS is my favorite one ever. So simple and made exactly for one purpose: to turn a computer into a gaming console. It’s perfect for that. Bazzite is similar. The only thing holding me back is kernel-level anti cheat used in a few games I want to play first, like Helldivers 2. After that, bye bye Windows.
For real work, I use my Macs for everything else. I’m somewhat intrigued by the Snapdragon Surface hardware… a touchscreen would be nice… but it’s too bad they run Windows.
I grew up on MS DOS and Windows 2, then eventually 3. Used every version since then, and IMHO it all went downhill after Windows XP. My fresh install of 11 was filled with ads, copilot spam, conflicting settings, dark patterns trying to subscribe me to things and change my preferences back to Microsoft stuff (like trying to disable Kagi so I’d use Bing). I used to like Windows, then tolerated it, and now just can’t stand it. Totally enshittified. I am the product, indeed.
To answer the question: no, not even thinking about it. If you care to know why, it’s because the things which bother people in this thread about MS, I don’t care about.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I consider myself pretty Linux fluent. Not extremely proficient, but I can get around just fine.
I’ve had a couple occasions recently where business associates needed to have Linux available for forensics, disk and chip recovery, etc., and I spent some time trying to get them off the ground with installations on laptops. The experiences really brought to my attention the specialized knowledge needed for someone to switch from Windows to Linux. (We were using Mint one time and Zorin the other.) Getting them up and running with using OfficeLibre, browsing, moving files, and so forth with a single drive was not too bad. The other stuff (mounting and unmounting, repositories, paths, user control, etc.) was like teaching a foreign language. While I have no love for MS and Windows, they do a pretty good job of hiding the hard parts. Even distros like Zorin really don’t do that well when it comes to user experience, especially when the user needs Linux to do un-Windows-like tasks.
One aspect that both people mentioned was that they perceived no difference in how well LInux ran when compared to Windows. “I thought Linux was supposed to run faster on the same hardware.” They both thought there was no change at all.
I wish every UX team put their UIs through “regular person” testing, not just “it works fine when our QA tried it”. Makes me want to start a Grandma Test™ certification group, with a bunch of nice old ladies in nursing homes testing devices in exchange for, I dunno, Costco shopping sprees?
I expect most consumer electronics to fail catastrophically at that test.
On an relatively recent computer (< 5 years old), the average office app or web page is going to use, what, less than 1% of the available processing power? It’s almost indistinguishable from idle. The typical home or office user is unlikely to ever be bottlenecked by that. Maybe disk swapping, but even that would be hard to notice with a SSD.
I think the industry is a victim of its own success… computers have gotten so good at computing that the average person can’t really meaningfully differentiate them at the hardware level anymore, so bling and useless value-adds like Copilot spam are their measures of last resort. AI is the new 3DTV…
Same with the Office suite. Really most people would’ve been fine with Office 98 or 2000, so a move to an subscription model was inevitable.
Picking software is all the easiest part. Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave are all available for Linux. If you put Chrome on Linux and then sign into your Google account, all of your settings and stuff should appear. The underlying OS isn’t going to matter.
For email I think your best bet is going to be Thunderbird. It can handle all that you are asking of it, and there aren’t many other choices. Evolution could do it, too.
There are choices of a few different graphical file managers (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Finder on Macs). They have non-memorable names like Thunar or Nautilus. If the first one you try isn’t to your liking, try a different one.
There are plenty of movie players, like VLC or mpv. Netflix or YouTube will be played in your browser, though.
By far the biggest issue I see for you is the support, or lack of support, for a convertible laptop. The touch screen will work, it will just be another mouse. LInux screens can rotate, but I really can’t guess as to whether screen rotation is going to trigger automatically based on the orientation sensor.
This is where trying a live distribution, and doing some research, may really pay off. (Just making up an example) if Ubuntu has that all sorted out, then go with Ubuntu.
I think things like this are where a corporate Linux made for that specific form factor (i.e. a convertible Android tablet) are going to make a substantial difference in UX.
The touchscreen isn’t just a virtual mouse, or things like hold-to-right-click or multi-finger gestures would be impossible, not to mention the finger-ability of tiny UI elements next to each other.
And screen rotation is more than just rotating the screen itself… the apps also have to adjust their layout to fit a portrait orientation and not have their menus and borders simply run off the side of the screen. With webpages it’s automatic, but not all desktop apps will do that elegantly. Android apps will, of course.
You should try it out with a live CD (or live USB boot stick). It’s a method, offered by most consumer-facing Linux distros, of letting you try out a Linux without any permanent changes to your computer.
It takes a few minutes to set it up on Windows, “burning” the image onto a CD or a USB drive. Then you can plug it in, reboot into that Linux and try it out and see how you like it, including the touchscreen and any apps you care about (like Thunderbird and probably LibreOffice or MS Office Online).
Try it for a few days and see if you like it enough to permanently install it. If not, just unplug it and reboot and you’re back to Windows. (The live USB experience doesn’t save anything permanently though, so don’t customize it too much or install a bunch of apps… just fiddle with it a bit to get a feel, as though it were a store demo).
You can also dual-boot, but that’s probably more of a hassle than it’s worth.
A tablet is a non-starter, for a lot a reasons. Let’s just say i used to have an iPad, and i hated using it. Basically, a phone that is easy to hold in one hand, and/or a real laptop with a built-in keyboard is always better for my use cases.
A Chromebook is a possibility. But i already have 3 laptops that work well. (And an upgrade to the Mac that is in reserve. Long story.) I’m not buying another large-screen device until one that i already own becomes unusable. While it’s getting harder and harder to find where MS his my files on the travel laptop, it’s not close to unusable. Just mildly annoying.
I only use it in the ordinary configuration and as a “tent”, which is just upside down. So the orientation is still landscape. The device can be used as a portrait-oriented tablet, but I’ve never wanted to do that. In fact, i sometimes have the screen messed up by it cycling through portrait and losing some “where is that window” information, which is basically a bug for the way i use it.
Great, that should make it a lot easier to support. Hopefully the Linux will just detect the orientation change, or else you can set up a hotkey to quickly flip it upside down. (Or search to see if you can find a solution for your specific laptop on a specific distro.)
Maybe I should have said it’s just a giant track pad.
A 180 degree rotation, like tenting a laptop, won’t require the apps to rearrange themselves much. 90 degree rotations are more difficult. Gnome desktop components seem to handle it fine, but any given app may need to be manually resized.
And to both-sides it, during my brief and terrible experience with a Windows 10 tablet, Windows apps didn’t do a good job with it, either. Even some Windows desktop components did not handle it gracefully.
I think the fundamental problem is that an interface designed for a keyboard and mouse is not well suited to touchscreen tablet style interaction. I’m sure it can be done, but it takes many more changes than just putting up an onscreen keyboard.
Good question, I have no idea Probably not? I’m just old, and the idea of having an entire operating system on a tiny little stick still feels like magic…
But, as of 2025, I am at least happy to report that you no longer have to use 5.25" floppy disks!
What? MS Office Online is great in Linux. I use it through Microsoft Edge on Linux, and it has cut way down on my need to startup a Windows virtual machine.
This goes back to the “most people only need Office 98 or 2000” sentiment, though. My Office needs are reasonably simple. Basic spreadsheets, even with very complex formulas, work well. I can read and comment on Word documents. I suppose I could write Word documents.
The main thing missing for me is the ability to export CSV files. xlsx2csv on the command line handles that, though.
I have run into the “Office Online doesn’t support that” issue before, though, but for me it is rare. If it is not rare for someone, then they definitely need a full version of MS Office.
If it’s just a matter of “I’m afraid of running an app in a browser” or “never again, OneDrive,” then Libreoffice is a good alternative. Really, just like all the anti-Linux “I need Photoshop” complaints. If you need MS Office, then you are locked into using an OS it runs on.
I like Linux. I’ve been using Linux since the days when you downloaded it to a PC using a blazingly fast 9600 baud modem and copied it to floppy disks for installation. I am very comfortable with Linux. I have even written a few Linux device drivers.
But there is no way in hell that I would ever recommend Linux as a general replacement for Windows.
Linux isn’t an operating system. Linux is a whole bunch of different operating systems. They share a lot of source code, but each Linux distribution is it’s own different thing. You can end up in a bit of a nightmare chasing versions and figuring out which distribution is right for you. Do I install something that is Debian-based? Red-hat based? Mint? Ubuntu?
Common apps will be included with your distribution. Anything that isn’t common is distributed as source code, which means you have to build it yourself. Now you are no longer just a user, but you are effectively being forced to act as a software developer. And if something goes wrong with the build, you get a bizillion error codes whizzing by on the screen. Good luck figuring out what went wrong.
Any new hardware that is proprietary or makes you sign an NDA before they let you see how it works will not work at all under Linux. Open source and NDAs don’t go together. For many years, this was why Linux didn’t work with a lot of laptops and their Wi-Fi adapters.
This is an excellent example of what is wrong with Linux. Too often you end up being sent to the command line. For someone like me, that’s no biggie. But for someone who isn’t a command line hacker, there’s an old joke about Unix that says “Unix is very user friendly. It’s just particular about who its friends are.”
This is another problem with Linux. “Equivalents” like this often aren’t actually equivalent. I use LibreOffice at home and I am mostly happy with it. But it’s not the equivalent of MS-Office and I can’t use LibreOffice for work stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Linux. For some people, it’s great and it does everything that they need. But it is definitely not a generic replacement for Windows. Not even close (IMHO).
