No, that’s really not what i need. What i need is tools that don’t require me to memorize a bunch of magic keys and keystrokes. Seriously.
(Did you see that i have trouble logging into my work laptop because it requires a lot of precise typing? Did you see that my husband is a VIm expert. It’s just not a good tool for me.)
I said it was a good option for wrangling text. It (along with TECO and Emacs) 100% comes from the tradition of memorizing (as muscle memory) as many magic keys and keystrokes as humanly possible (which efficiency there was a reason for once upon a time)
No. I’ve used Linux Ubuntu and am familiar with the operating system. It definitely has its uses and its good points, but I wouldn’t trade it for my Windows 11 for a variety of reasons such as One Drive and Office 365.
Oh, it’s a fabulous option for my husband. But you were replying to me. It’s a horrible painful unhelpful option for me. I’d do better to write the novel by hand and hire someone else to type it.
This is a total digression, but you used to be able to do that! Or there was a qualified secretary whose duties included typing. It is certainly still possible, but I have no idea of the price. I taught myself how to type early on. People I know who do not know how to type found themselves handicapped in certain situations.
My understanding is that Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, is just a bit more Windows-y, similar to KDE. That’s why people tend to recommend it, I think.
I used the command line a decent bit, but I also was doing a lot of tweaking and such. Even back then I don’t think common use cases would use it.
The main thing about using the command line is that, if you need to do something fiddly, you can just do it instead of hunting through bunches of stuff. That’s why some people like it. And you can script things, automating annoying tasks.
I type well enough to work on the modern era. But i rely heavily on being able to look at menus. And even doing something that i do all the time (cutting and pasting, using cntl x and cntl c) i sometimes hit the wrong keys and need to redo something. The undo key was such a wonderful invention.
(This is also why I’m not great at video games. I sometimes just hit the wrong button. When i was playing a lot of Minecraft, i had to rebind the “toss this item” button to be far away from any buttons i regularly used, because i tended to accidentally toss my good pickaxe into a cactus or something.)
Ugh, VI/VIM. I’ve hated that editor for decades. There are much friendlier, much more standard editors out there. Beep mode – exactly.
Anyway, my main laptop for a few years now is a Chromebook, which is Linux. But, within that, for the last two or three years, I use the Linux environment and install the Brave Browser, so Linux within Linux.
My desktop is Windows, but I need that to dial into to work and to play games, so that’s not changing. I’ve had success turning off the ads and AI in Windows.
I also support the vote for Ubuntu. It sounds like you do not care about the specific differences between the many flavors of Linux, which is fair. Then just take Ubuntu as one of the major versions which is well supported and has lots of questions answered on the Web (for now at least). Once you’ve got Ubuntu running you can look at other versions if you wish, to see whether they offer anything in addition for you.
I recently installed Ubuntu on several computers and found the process very user friendly. Only the process of creating a bootable USB-stick is a bit more work, fortunately there are excellent descriptions on the Internet to guide you through the process. The resulting installation is quite Windows-like (as far as possible in Linux) and you shouldn’t normally need to use the Terminal at all. I wouldn’t bother about which desktop system to use and so on, just use the default for everything, it shouldn’t matter for your usage.
You will need to use LibreOffice as MS Office replacement though, which does work but is not a perfect replacement.
I already use both the Mac and Windows versions of libre office for many things, and unless the Linux version is much worse, it’s completely adequate for what i use this laptop for.
And a lot of other programs I’d want to use (all the major web browsers, audacity, Minecraft😉) have native Linux versions.
I don’t much care for Thunderbird, but it happens to be what I’m currently using, so i can continue to live with it.
This. Stick with the defaults. Only deviate if you have a particular reason to do so. This is always the easiest and well trodden path for a new user.
But how will they know I hate them if I don’t tell them? You’re really binding my hands here.
That’s great! Just go for it then, create the USB-stick, boot up and see how you like it. After testing it you can install it for real which just means answering a few questions and let it run for an hour or so.
If there’s room on the hard drive, doesn’t Linux make it really easy to partition the drive and hive off 50GB or something for itself, so you can dual boot Linux and Windows? That’s something I used to do.
That is not really a function of Linux, but of the bootloader. GRUB (e.g.) can certainly display a menu of operating systems to boot from, and you can be sure it will have no problem booting various configurations of Linux.
In my experience, most of the problems with dual booting come from the fact that Windows doesn’t play nice with the other children.
If you are setting up a dual boot system, install Windows first, and just leave some blank unpartitioned space for Linux. After Windows is installed, then install Linux and it will easily set up the boot loader and install in the unpartitioned space.
The key is to always install Windows first. Linux plays nice with Windows. Windows does not play nice with Linux.
If you are installing on an existing system, use Windows tools to resize your partitions (basically, do all the Windows stuff from Windows). Then once you have your unpartitioned space, then install Linux.
Yeah, that’s what I remember doing when I was playing with Linux in a dual boot environment.
Now, I use it on my Chromebooks and my personal VPN, and my Windows machines are all Windows.
I never thought I would say this but yes.
So far I’ve not been significantly impacted by Windows continuous enshitification process, however I can see were things are going.
I also heard that most games run on Linux now (my only significant roadblock).
So, if and when, Windows completely enshitifies itself (say, turning into an “AI agenting” OS) I will probably bite the bullet and migrate to Linux.
I often use GUI-less Linux servers at work so I’m comfortable with both. In the past I’ve ran just Linux on my laptop and Windows on my desktop and it’s worked well. I’m currently dual booting my laptop. I absolutely abhor Gnome. If it’s the default I’ll usually drop down into the CLI to get stuff done or until I can switch to KDE. I do feel like Libreoffice can take the place of Microsoft Office. If I didn’t have a valid license for Office 2013 I’d be using it on both Linux and Windows.
It’s gaming that keeps bringing me back to Windows. It’s almost always seamless and just works.
If you are dual booting, I’d recommend you to use two separate drives with two separate boot loaders that are ultimately managed by boot ordering in the bios/UEFI (a video outlining this method).
This should protect your Linux setup from Windows who’ll have no idea that you have a second OS on a completely different drive.
1000% this.
I got REALLY lucky, in that after I ditched windows for personal use, I set up a VM for it for my job, which ultimately didn’t work for me (one of the pieces of software I use regularly couldn’t handle the way the VM used the GPU); I had to install a dual-boot of windows, but after the forced update that broke my Windows install originally (and spurred my decision to go Linux) ALSO screwed up the bootloader, I was able to install Windows after Linux, only because GRUB was already confused about what the hell was going on on my system, and windows had sufficiently confused itself that it didn’t overwrite GRUB.
Good times…