Linux: possibly ready to make the plunge after a 20-year consideration period

[ftg]

@Chronos

The most popular Linux nowadays is ChromeOS, and you can get a laptop built for it and with it already installed for a couple hundred dollars (a Chromebook). It’s still not perfect (no OS is), but it has the vast majority of the rough edges sanded off, to the best of Google’s ability to do so.

If you’re talking about OSes with Linux kernels, Android wins by an incredible margin over anything else.

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I’m another Cygwin fan. Run almost all the Linux stuff I want using it including X windows. If I need a “real” Linux I fire up one of my Raspberry Pis. I have a Pi Zero that I just plug into the USB port of my PC for power/networking and access it via the KVM on my PC.

[gnoitall]

@jz78817

Don’t delude yourself into believing Linux will afford you that ability. It’s an enormous OS just like anything reasonably modern.
Don’t delude yourself into believing Linux is free of bugs or crashes. I run ubuntu on my laptop and probably every third time I log in I get a dialog saying “sorry, but ubuntu 16.04 has experienced an internal error” and asks me to report it. I’ve had system menus just lose their configurations and program entries vanish. I’ve had it throw an “oops” (the Linux equivalent of a blue screen of death) here and there plugging/unplugging USB devices. And graphics drivers (especially AMD) are perpetually a step behind Windows.
You “knew what every file in the DOS directory was for” because DOS was an incredibly minimal OS which did precisely jack and shit. It was written around all of the quirks and limitations of the 16-bit 8086 which haven’t existed for decades. To boot an MS-DOS system required only three files; IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and COMMAND.COM. Those days are gone.

^jz78817 speaks truth.

I’ve owned, operated, and sysadmin’ed unix and Linux systems for the last 20 years. At a level of detail above “overview”, even I would not claim to understand more than 20-25 percent of it. This is an ancient problem, really. Embedded documentation (the forerunner of the man page system) was introduced in 1971, simply because even by that early time (Unix Version 1) it was too complex for anyone who wasn’t Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie to keep it all in their heads.

Now, I will admit that the idea of effective control – having root access – is a big reason why I use Linux and BSD variants today. Microsoft’s access control reserves the big kahuna – Ring 0, and the “system” user – to itself, and only allows the authorized Administrator account to petition the system politely to do important stuff. It’s also the reason I root Android devices as soon as I can, and why I don’t buy Apple mobile devices.

[Evan_Drake]

Try one of the BSDs if you don’t like Linux.

[JerrySTL]

You can put a Linux subsystem on your Windows 10 machine for free. I’ve done it. I use unix and linux at work and so far everything I’ve tried on my home Windows 10 machine works.

Your PC must be running a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Anniversary Update or later (build 1607+).

Install WSL

[GESancMan]

@gnoitall

Now, I will admit that the idea of effective control – having root access – is a big reason why I use Linux and BSD variants today. Microsoft’s access control reserves the big kahuna – Ring 0, and the “system” user – to itself, and only allows the authorized Administrator account to petition the system politely to do important stuff. It’s also the reason I root Android devices as soon as I can, and why I don’t buy Apple mobile devices.

This was all I meant. I’m tired of being treated as a peon user on my own goddamn computer. I didn’t think people would take me so literally when I said “full control.”

Anyway, I decided you all are right, a dual boot is the best way to go for the time being. I went with Mint and KDE, and so far I like it.

Thanks to everyone for the advice.

[PastTense]

Perhaps you might update us in a few months as to how the transition went.