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Comment by pmelendez | Hacker News Reader

"My wife's Windows machine kept slowing down. I wanted to put an SSD in it but we didn't have the ability to do a reinstall on a new drive. So we put an SSD, more RAM, and Xubuntu on it. She's been smooth sailing for 6 months."

That probably has more to do with the hardware upgrade rather than the OS

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I recently bought an OEM Windows 10 system for personal use and the hard drive crashed. At first I ran into the "can't reinstall on a new drive" issue but I was able to work around that with a third party app that allowed me to install a fresh iso on a USB hard drive. And then to use another app that allowed me to clone the USB install into a new (internal) SSD.

I also tried Ubuntu on the same system but (among other niggling problems) i couldn't get the ATI graphics drivers to work.

Are you sure that you bought a modern system? ATI hasn't existed since 2006 and I believe AMD stopped using the brand name almost a decade ago; it's all AMD now. Also AMD GPUs have had really good FOSS support in the mainline kernel since the late 00's. Unless you were trying to get fglrx to work, in which case that was a huge mistake.

Thanks, sorry I meant AMD of course, Radeon RX 590 to be precise. Yes there was a driver available on AMD's site but I couldn't get it to work. Certainly my fault somehow, but at the end of the day it was much easier to just install Windows 10.

The RX 590 should be good to go with the kernel driver since last December: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RX-590-L...

What that practically means is that any linux distro with a kernel at least that new should support your card without needing to download anything from AMD's website. (Generally speaking, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website is a windows-ism. There are some exceptions, like Nvidia, but a machine well configured for linux use should aim to use hardware supported by FOSS drivers (such as your AMD card.))

Probably not, Xubuntu is one of those least resource intensive and stable distros (on LTS) and it's one of the desktops that uses least amount of RAM.

yes and no.

It got a hardware upgrade.

But i couldn't do the hardware upgrade without re-purchasing another Windows license since her install was an OEM install and they don't provide install disks.

Secondly - Windows slows down over time. Horribly. Linux does not.

Third - You don't really have to run an AV in Linux, thus chewing up resources.

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