I jumped ship 8 or 9 years ago, after using Windows 10 for about a year. I tried a few distros, and finally settled on Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu using the KDE interface. While I can get more in-depth into the working of computers than the average person - that is, I’m “good with computers” - I am not a hard-core tech person.
Kubuntu, out of the box, looks a lot like Windows:
KDE is configurable enough that I abandoned that look long ago. You have many different options for how the “start” menu looks, how the panels (“task bar”) operate, and so on. And if you don’t like what’s supplied with the OS, you can download more options, very easily.
The article I took that screen shot from gives a good overview of Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
There’s also Winux, which is a KDE shell over Ubuntu designed specifically to give a Win10/11 look & feel. I installed it on a spare laptop and it seems to run well, but it’s relatively new and doesn’t appear to have a very robust support base yet.
I have LibreOffice, and used its ancestors back to the Star Office days, even before Sun bought them. I prefer the spreadsheet tool. But for professional work it just doesn’t hack it, by which I mean things like annotated manuscripts. When I worked for Sun that’s all we had at work. People ran into incompatibilities with PowerPoint all the time, I did conference presentations on my personal PC in PowerPoint to avoid them.
If you are using it for simple things, it is great.
The pain of transition to Linux (if there is any) falls into several categories (assuming some popular distribution such as Linux Mint):
Installing it - it’s honestly very simple, in general terms of installing an operating system on a computer, but installing an operating system isn’t something that everybody has done or that everybody can just take in their stride. A lot of Windows users just buy the computer with the OS already on it, so the installation process for any OS can feel daunting.
Getting everything working - there can be issues with things like wifi adaptors or sound interfaces etc - this really shouldn’t happen when installing a mainstream Linux distro on a machine that was bought with Windows 10 on it, but I do still hear about people having these sorts of problems, so it’s a potential pain point.
Adapting to a different Operating System - honestly, Linux is different in the way that it organises the file system and such, but in terms of day to day interaction with desktop applications, it’s remarkably similar to Windows - apps like the file explorer have different names, but everything works in a very windows-y sort of way. There are distributions that have been made-over to look very Windows-y, but IMO, if you have to change from Windows to Linux, might as well make it a change - and not try to bring Windows look and feel with you.
Software - this might be the biggest point of difficulty, depending on the type of stuff you do with your computer. If, for example, you are invested in the Adobe Creative Suite, then forget Linux - there is no version of Adobe CS for Linux and no workarounds to get the Windows version running reliably through frameworks like Wine. There are very good alternative Linux softwares to replace their Windows counterparts and often they are free, but in many cases, you’re on a brand new learning curve to get used to them.
If you just use your computer for web browsing and email and light document editing, then Linux will probably work very well for you; web browsers like Chrome and Firefox are identical to their Windows counterparts; LibreOffice is pretty decent (although again learning curve if you’re coming from a modern version of MS Office). If you want to play games, I understand there have been some great advances in that area recently (but I’m not the person to advise on that as I am not a gamer).
I waved goodbye to Windows 11 in February of this year and my main production PC (mostly video editing) is running Linux Mint. It has been a breath of fresh air, but I have a fair amount of experience installing and running Linux alongside Windows.
Linux typically performs better than Windows on the same hardware (although the difference isn’t as remarkable as it used to be); Linux does what I need and doesn’t try pushing things I don’t need into my face.
Yeah. Can’t do that. Way too much money (not so much because Apple tends to be pricier than Windows but because I would have to buy a whole new system).
I really wish I could just have Windows with a Windows 7 interface. I read all about the ways to make Windows 11 look and act more like Windows 10 but I don’t like the 10 interface much and really want to do W7 which I’m simulating right now on top of W10.
I haven’t even looked for ideas of making W11 work like W7! I’m afraid that’s a bridge too far.
It’s third-party software, but Stardock is pretty legit… they’ve been around for a long time.
On Macs, if you ever do buy another computer, even a used M1 laptop is a very good computer and vastly better than any non-Snapdragon Windows laptop. Like not even night and day difference, but universes apart.
My biggest problem with Ubuntu is despite MacOS (command line) which is (at least prima facie) similar, so often there are apps where your choice is Windows or MacOS (and even more frustratingly Android and IoS which usually require their own versions).
I should know yet do not if Linux native app development has to account for the many flavors of Linux. I very much miss Notepad++ yet the port to Linux for it was unreliable, as is Notepadqq. So I just use VS code.
Nvidia GPUs perform worse, sometimes significantly worse, via Linux than they do on Windows and are more fiddly to keep working well. This will of course be more of a barrier for some than others but it’s enough to keep me on Windows due to how hard I work my high end GPU.
This isn’t any sort of “Prove me wrong” or “Change my mind”, just a data point on the Linux conversation topic. Since the vast majority of consumer discrete GPUs are Nvidia, it could make a difference for some though it really depends on what you’re using your GPU for.
I rather agree; as far as I can see there is no big downside to Win 11 vs 10. I had to replace my desktop system because of hardware failures a couple of years ago, and the new one came with 11, of course. So the start button is in the middle rather than on the left… who cares?
I use Firefox with ublock, so I’m not seeing any ads.
I also just updated my wife’s laptop from 10 to 11, and she doesn’t seem to have any concerns: all the things she uses still work.
It does seem to be true that as windows versions evolve, more and more background processes seem to be introduced. Every darn application seems to start a ‘updater’ thread. These are only a minor annoyance though: they are normally suspended and do not consume any CPU time, though they do eat memory.
Though I remember back in XP days I could pare back sheduled processes to about 10 or so by careful configuration.
I blame Berkeley UNIX for this mess, mind you. They were responsible for the idea of introducing userlevel ‘daemons’ for many tasks which should probably have been done in the kernel. One can see why though: userlevel programming is much easier and forgiving than kernel work, and they had to teach undergraduates…
My usage is quite GPU-heavy (video editing) and my experience has been pretty good with my 3090 - I get slightly faster render times under Linux. Maybe it’s more of a problem on newer cards.
Davinci Resolve Studio. It is also quite CPU intensive, so it’s not necessarily easy to determine where the (slight) additional performance is coming from.
