I’ve been using a succession of MS Surface tablets with the pop-off keyboard / screen cover as my sole machine since roughly when they were first introduced in 2012, so 13 years (wow). I’m typing this on my Surface Pro 11 right now.
The “stupid kickstand” is the best feature it has. A laptop on my lap always tries to fall over backwards. A Surface on my lap never does. A laptop is thick and heavy. A Surface is thin and light.
A typical tablet with some accessory keyboard is awkward and you sort of need a case / protector for the tablet in addition to the keyboard. The Surface has none of that aftermarket one size fits none stupidity. Neat, sweet, integrated unless you just want the tablet, in which case the keyboard pops off easily.
As you say, you do you. And UI is complicated. I’m struggling to imagine how a tablet with a kickstand sits comfortably on your lap at a viewable angle. I comfortably hold laptops on my lap every day. Sometimes with a cat in the lap, too.
This is why it’s nice to have a variety of choices.
Yeah I’m seriously considering it. Windows has been getting worse and worse, and Linux is a very stable and viable OS. If you just do things like browsing the internet and office tasks that can be done with Open/Libre Office, then Linux will be 90% like using Windows but without much of the AI/OneDrive/advertisement/automatic update nonsense.
Linux distributions like Mint can be easy to install and use if your needs aren’t complex. However, even though the Linux desktop and Windows desktop look similar, Linux is a lot more complicated (and capable) under the hood than Windows is.
Through WINE, most Windows programs will run fine on Linux. With WINE/Proton, most Windows games work too.
For gamers based on my Steam Deck experience Linux is also good but it’s compatible with maybe 90% of Windows games, not 100%. Some Windows games even run better on Linux systems. Some don’t run at all. Most run just as well. You aren’t going to run the online shooters with kernel-level anticheat like Battlefield 6 on Linux.
This is one of the things I find that Linux tends to handle much better than any other OS. My experience is mostly with Debian, but most of the Unix-like desktop distributions are going to be similar[1] (so not ChromeOS or Android).
Updates are by discrete pieces of software. If there is a security update for libreoffice, then I get an updated version of libreoffice. In most cases the extent of the update are fixes for the problem. No more than necessary is updated, and the reason and changes in the update are explicitly described.
There may be other minor updates that fix non-urgent bugs, or add hardware support, and such. These minor updates tend to be just that, minor.
Yes, bugs and regressions can always slip into the process, but on the whole I am very comfortable allowing security updates to install automatically on all of my production systems.
rolling distributions update continuously, but if you run one of those, it’s because doing updates gives you a dopamine hit ↩︎
Make that: without ANY of the AI/OneDrive/advertisement/automatic update nonsense.
I made the switch about 8 years ago, for many of the same reasons listed in this thread. I was finding the nonsense to be unbearable back then!
I started with the KDE version of Mint, and did the dual-boot thing for a few months. Then I went all-in, repartitioning and reformatting my hard drive and installing Linux only. Shortly afterward, Mint announced they were dropping KDE, so I tried a couple of other distros before landing on Kubuntu.
I’ve been very happy with it. I have yet to come across a game that won’t run (using Lutris), but I admit I’m not playing the latest-and-greatest games out there.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned in this thread is the time it takes to update the system. I remember with Windows, if the system needed to update you may as well go out to the movies or something, and hopefully it’d be done by the time you got back. On Kubuntu, a major system update takes two or three minutes tops, and that includes rebooting.
Right click on a running app in the Mac Dock and it shows all open windows for that application, with indicators for the ones that are open but minimized.
Oh man, the speed of updating is absolutely amazing. Windows would take up about 97% of all available resources with its various update processes–switching tabs on a browser would take 2-3 minutes sometimes. I’d pull up Task Manager and see that “MO Uso Worker Process” and “Windows Installer Helper Module” and “Windows Update” would be hogging every available resource–processor, disk access, everything–for HOURS. I’d kill processes and they’d be back in a minute. I’d go into regedit and turn them all off and I’d get maybe an hour or two of uninterrupted use of MY FUCKING COMPUTER THAT I PAID FOR before the OS turned it all back on again. Nothing worked, I spent more time trying to fight the updates than any other activity on my computer. A couple times I’d just say fuckit and preemptively trigger the update process before going to bed. Wake up and it’s STILL trying to install some worthless shit.
Now I check the taskbar, it says I have updates, I mash a button and yeah, about two minutes later it’s done. Maybe have to reboot but that takes seconds, rather than the actual honest to jeebus 15 minutes it took Windows to get back to desktop. It goes even faster in terminal–”sudo apt update” and “sudo apt upgrade” and it takes even less time than using the update manager.
I’m typing this from the default Firefox that came with Ubuntu. The touchpad works okay. The touchscreen is probably okay. The keyboard and a USB mouse work fine. My bluetooth headphones work. I was even able to watch Netflix in a Firefox window with the laptop in “tent” mode.
My husband suggests I set it up to dual-boot, and try living with it for a while. (After backing up anything important on the laptop.) Maybe later this week. Tomorrow we plan to buy a car, which is probably enough excitement for the day.
Neither the touchpad nor the touch screen work as smoothly as in Windows, which might be an issue. (I don’t like to need a mouse, I mostly use the touchpad.) But it’s possible that if I can install updated drivers it will work better. Thus, the value of double-booting for a while, to see if I can solve those issues.
Also, I’m pretty sure I’m getting less volume out of the built-in speakers. But my headphones work perfectly, and I don’t need a ton of volume from the speakers.
There should be graphical touchpad/mouse settings someplace… You’re probably using some version of Gnome, if you need to search the web for how to find them. Anyway, you should be able to adjust the speed, acceleration, tap, and other settings more to your liking.
Yeah, maybe. I was able to adjust the speed. It’s not that, it just feels a little less smooth, like maybe the driver is less responsive. I switched back to Windows, to see if it’s the same here. And I don’t think so.
I found a list of PCs certified to use with this Ubuntu, and the laptop isn’t one it. (A very long list, I may add.)
That being said, it also said that there are drivers I might want to install, but I can’t do that from the USB chip, I would want to do that from an actual installation. And it might be that with more specific or up-to-date drivers it would work better.
I’ve not read through this entire thread, but just coming here to say I have moved from windows to Ubuntu for about 1 month now and I am very happy. I use it for gaming, browsing, programming.
I am happy to have full control over my pc. I don’t think I can ever go back to windows.
I have a Windows 11 laptop as a form of future-proofing against applications that will no longer run on Windows 7. This is already the case with my tax preparation software. But that software runs on Windows 10 and 11, Mac, Android, and iOS on iPhone and iPad. Not Linux. So that right there is a non-starter, along with the fact that I’m not conversant with the many technicalities of setting up and running Linux. Also, I need MS Office.
I agree that Window 11 is pretty shitty, but what can you do? I can deal with “pretty shitty”. I cannot deal with “does not support my needs”.
You can run older/incompatible software in a Virtual Machine.
My advice is to always have to most up-to-date OS (Win11, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) installed on your bare metal machine. Then if you have older software that can only run on Win XP/7/8/10 (or whatever), you can install those old OS’s in a VM and run the software inside of THAT.
Its much safer having a throwaway VM (that you can restore to new at an instant), then to run an old OS natively. I run Windows VMs in Linux, Linux inside another Linux; virtualization is wonderful, a great way to have compatible access to all software on all systems.
Honestly it even makes choosing a Linux distro easy. Choose whatever works for you and your machine. With a few clicks you can have access to all the other distros, their package management systems, or whatever. There’s even applications (like Distrobox) which make containerization of other distros seamless.
The problem is not usually older software that won’t run on a newer OS (although sometimes it is). The problem is usually the reverse – that mandatory newer applications won’t run on an older OS.
I have VMware installed on at least three computers. It’s a brilliant piece of technology and can be very useful. But there are challenges installing it under an older OS in order to run a newer OS. The version of VMware that will run on an older OS may not even support the virtualization of a new one like Windows 11. And even if it did, the extravagant memory demands of a new OS might not be feasible in the VM on an older computer. And where am I supposed to get a license key to install W11 in the VM? It can be cheaper to just buy a new low-end laptop.
Well I must restate. I always recommend having to most up-to-date OS (Win11, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) installed on your bare metal machine. It is in THIS layer to run your newer applications. If you need older applications, you should run them in a VM with the old WinXP/7/8/10 OS’s.
Now if you have an old computer, my safest method is to install an up-to-date lightweight/barebones distro of Linux (normally Debian, without a Desktop Environment) then to install VMs of older OS’s onto it.
I do not try to install a modern OS onto a machine that cannot handle its requirements. It just won’t work to try to install Win11 on a machine designed to run Win7 (however Win11 on a machine designed to run Win10 is possible).
And, of course, you can find MANY minimal modern Linux distros that can run on the oldest hardware. (MX Linux is a popular Debian based desktop distro that is very lightweight).
If you are going to be spending enough of your time in the Windows environment, you may as well just run Windows. Especially if that’s what you already have.