Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS

LTSB is fantastic, except there is no linux subsystem. If you can live without that, or use Cygwin instead, it's far and away the best Windows distribution.

Don't you need to be on volume licensing to get that? Which rules it out for most.

Not sure that my Uni can support these, plus they have no Linux subsystem (which is quite useful) and last time I heard, they are ditching Office 365 ProPlus support for that branch (which is the Office we use on campus, and I require in my workflow).

I wasn't aware there was a windows default install that is this sensible! Thanks for pointing it out.

You can disable these “features” on enterprise but you need to dig around in the settings and google how to do it.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but when the Forbes article author was complaining about a random unplanned forced update I thought surely the guy just didn't bother to change the default settings.

Now I've come to your comment and am now realizing that apparently there is no built in functionality to prevent forced update/reboots (while connected to the internet) in Windows 10.

I not crazy anti-Microsoft, but that's absurd and honestly aside from gaming (which I don't have a gaming PC anyways) I miss nothing from Windows.

I see comments about Linux on random laptops, I've only have had good experiences with it generally. I'm not a power user. I've run at least one distro or another on a random cheap netbook, a 2005-08 Sony laptop, a low end and higher end Lenovo laptops, and honestly other than the one I'm on right now I've not had the problems people talk about it (something related to the CPU was crashing the system, found a solution online and everything is good now). Maybe I'm just lucky.

What about the non serious OSX UI with that bouncing effects and click-click-click and hidden in the topbar menu controls?

> Because Windows is not a serious system.

The guy from the article is still in the honeymoon phase. Wait until he tries to move all his files from one disk to another, zipping them to a pendrive in batches, and restoring them on his shiny new system. And doing this in a multi-tasking way as this is time-consuming. Simple task? When he is done, when trying to open a file, he will find the destination folder is full of corrupted files.

Stunned? This was true 15 years ago, and as recent as 2 months ago (on a range of distros, last one Ubuntu). How serious a system is that? I'd say it disqualifies the system for all uses.

Regardless, as a desktop foundation Linux is a dream that had a place in time. Permissions, usernames, Posix filetimes and C itself are all non-starters in this era. They bog down trivial tasks, but also development and distribution, to the point of provoking a survivors-bias so bad that those survivors will die blind, swearing the OS is sliced bread and that all of humanity missed out. Bash is their unsung hero.

Don't listen. It's poison our community is full of. The Linux folks just want more help to put out all the fires, and, if need be, fool you into believing their gospel.

Reality is: heaven will never come to pass. Linux hurts more than it gives back. It's a brain drain. It's time to die. Please die.

It really kills me every time I see a Windows hint like this. Ten or fifteen or maybe even twenty years ago, one of Windows' arguments against Linux was that configuring simple things (like, say, preventing automatic updates from interrupting your fucking workflow) involved some series of arcane commands that I'll never be able to walk my wife or my mom through over the phone.

Now it's literally the opposite.

My wife's laptop runs OpenSUSE (or maybe Manjaro, I can't remember what I put on there after she got upset with Mint for whatever reason; whatever it was, the updates work and she can get whatever software she wants to work without my intervention, because I haven't heard about it for almost a year.) My mom's still cursing Windows 10 almost daily, and still bemoans the loss of Windows 7 (lol). But she's literally terrified to let me install anything else, even after I've shown her how easy it is to use. Microsoft has completely removed her ability to choose something else. She trusts them more than me. It's scary.

Yup, I have to remove a bunch of apps/games I never asked for after every major upgrade.

But Microsoft move the goalposts.

In a previous role at a very security conscious company I designed and built a malware analysis platform built on Linux with KVM VMs. Some of these needed to be Windows because of certain software we ran, and we needed to be sure they were fully patched and free of any malware from a previous run. So snapshots were no good, we needed to built new VMs from the Windows equivalent of a kickstart ( autoattend.xml). This worked fine for a couple of months.

Until Microsoft decided that their 'Professional' SKU shouldn't do this. So suddenly our auto builds stopped working as they were waiting for product keys that we already supplied.We could have gone to Enterprise, with the associated volume licensing agreement, but it was ridiculous and let a sour taste in our mouths. All this time the Linux VMs happily rebuilt in less than 2 minutes.

I've literally talked today to a company who want me to move their large Windows deployment to Linux for the same reason. Nobody wants to be held hostage to a supplier.

Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't out in 2010.

You said it yourself — you’ve been running ThinkPads with Fedora. So essentially, you have restricted yourself to one particular line of laptops and one distribution. That is probably why you havn’t felt the pain of having to figure out why the trackpad stops working once in a while — or why the sound card went all mute — or why the battery life suddenly went from being decent to downright horrible.

I agree that such standardization would be valuable, and I will try to agitate for that. For the average person, however, it seems that a web browser is practically the whole OS to them. I bet a media player, and office productivity software round out the top three applications. Any OS that offers a stable platform for running those could theoretically satisfy a huge chunk of the population. For this hypothetical average user, if a browser is the only interface they use and have familiarity with, what difference does the underlying OS make to them? In this regard, mobile devices have already filled much of that niche.

With all the news stories lately about data collection and misuse, I hope that opposition to surveillance is growing among the population. Maybe one day they'll see it like this: I can run my browser here, pay Microsoft for the privilege, make it easy for them to surveil me, and accept their pushy updates with unwanted restarts. Or I can run it on this other OS that costs $0, and doesn't send data back to Microsoft.

Maybe I'm misjudging the population and they actually don't care at all, but I hope that's changing with the past few years of data scandals, and the recent deluge of ToS update emails from companies preparing for the GDPR. The phrase "data collection", and some idea of its consequences, should now be more prominent in the collective consciousness. It strikes me as a great time for FLOSS software to try riding the wave of that attitude.

Except those things you find on SO often don't work because they're from 2010 and the way the internals are organized in your more modern distro are different, or they only ever applied to red hat based distros and you're on a debian based one, or the problem in question only looks very similar to a known bug in some old version of pulseaudio, etc.

Personally, I'm in favor of discoverability, especially for troubleshooting. Sadly, Windows is becomming more and more like Linux in this regard as time goes on and they try to make it into a phablet OS.

By the same token though, I find it much easier to fix remotely. I got tired of having to talk my father through tech support issues, since under windows it often required me walking him through all the steps. Far easier to email him a command string and tell him to paste it into the terminal. Sure, this doesn't help him learn how to fix things himself, but he has zero interest in learning to use the computer for anything more than a web browser anyway. And the lack of malware is a nice plus.

What do you have in mind for "outside the lines"? Gaming?

I've found the opposite. I'm a grad student, and my department assigned me to a computer with Windows 7. I found it incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to do things as simple as navigating to hidden directories or opening files therein, let alone anything even slightly further outside the lines of what my grandpa would use a computer for. It felt like Windows deliberately obfuscated everything, hiding it behind smoke and mirrors for the sake of a "friendlier" facade. Which makes it all the more frustrating -- why would someone go out of their way to make my life more difficult? The old saying that the "free" in "free software" is about freedom really hit home after my experiences. Linux never got in my way.

Purchased in early 2018. So I think the 2017 model?

Damn that's tempting. I really ought to get a professional's help though I'd probably succeed alone. It's my work laptop.

No. Peripherals and proprietary hardware.

This is awesome service, thank you for showing me.