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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I'm finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I'm currently making a list of distros and looking at each's pros and cons, including:
Personally, I've found the most supported software from Linux mint
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn't support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
I used to recommend Mint a lot, but it's falling too far behind hardware wise and in the front end. Lack of default Wayland support and so many unsupported hardware is not where you want to be sending new users today.
+1 for Fedora based distros at this point. I tend to push Nobara because it has a lot of hardware tweaks built in to give a better out of the box experience, but I can't really say vanilla Fedora has had issues as long as I was on an AMD platform.
Mint is cool. But, that mint in other menu. LMDE bookworm based. Rock solid and no slugish
I have to wonder if anyone at Microsoft is paying attention. It’s like New Coke in the 80s. They quickly realized they fucked up and rebranded the original as Classic Coke. I’m wondering if there will be a Windows Classic coming out soon with no AI, no subscription, no forced cloud dependency bullshit. lol probably not but whatever.
Keeping with the soft drink analogy, I think Pepsi tried something similar in the 90s with Crystal Pepsi, which also failed miserably.
If “lime must go up” always, then they need to come up with a better way than product enshitification.
New Coke was different in 2 important ways.
It was actually a way to hide the flavor change in the switch to Corn Syrup instead of Sugar, and never intended to be permanent.
Pepsi existed
There's no real commercial competition for Microsoft. Linux is great, but there's nobody for a business to call when shit fucks up. And Apple's walled garden and high prices make it terrible for enterprise.
For the moment they don't care about what the customer wants because their most important market is enterprise, not the customer. I'm not sure what would change that except hitting a critical mass of C-suite people who get fed up with it.
As long as companies are eating that they will be ok. BUT, like most tech companies, at some point they will pull a broadcom and then the alternatives will thrive.
What I've done is just bought a second hand key for Office 2014, and it works like a charm. Got it for like $10, and no money went to M$, and it has been working for several years without a problem.
For my personal desktop, at least. For my laptop rocking Linux I've been using LibreOffice without a problem.
What was painful about getting the stuff out of OneDrive?
When I did this it was straight forward.
mainly it was because I was trying it from my linux desktop, and if you try to download a large collection of files from the onedrive web interface it's 50/50 if it fails half-way through
Ah yes. I've had the same issue. The web download is hit and miss. Totally understand, and a warranted description of that experience.
What was it you would fallback to use Office for that you couldn’t do on Linux?
It mostly has to do with formatting things: sometimes I'll go to a conference, and they want the slides put on their computer, and powerpoint might display differently than on my Linux laptop, or collaborating on Word documents, where formatting can be somewhat fragile. In the past few conferences though, I got by fine with my laptop, making a PDF of the slides as a backup... So I was confident that things will turn out okay before I pulled the plug.
Are the webapps free or do you have to pay for them too? Could be a good option if collaborating with other people is important.
I suspect that you could use Linux, but people have muscle memory for certain things ig
Just cancelled my 365 the other day too. Been on Linux for half a year now and forgot I had it until the news of the copilot price increase came out and reminded me. I was happy I could cancel and be refunded the remainder of the term and get some money back in my pocket!
Welcome! Been like a year and a half for me, and I can't even imagine ever going back to Windows. Just using it for work is already too much.
I can feel the bloat when I use it now. Like you need to get from point a to b in a hallway. It's just you...and windows inflatable boat they fully inflated in the hallway between a and b. And you have to squeeze through to go to point b.
Cancelled mine too. Don’t particularly care about the AI. But I don’t need it and trying to justify increasing the price for it didn’t really work on me.
I’ve also gone all-in on Linux now. While I have a Mac, my gaming PC was left on Windows. Now it’s running Linux Mint and while gaming on Linux has a bit further to go, it’s night and day compared to 10 years ago. This time I feel like I can actually stick with it.
Yes, even though I did not have a subscription, watching them do stuff like this every 2 weeks for the last year or more is what finally pushed me off to Linux as well. I got my parents moved over as well though, and they did have a subscription previously.
The same thing happened with me. This was probably going to be my last year anyway, but i noped out real quick after the increase. Only reason I still had it was because I had some stuff in OneDrive that I was slowly backing up elsewhere. That just gave me the motivation to take care of it finally.