Replace Windows 7 with Linux

Linux might have better device driver support than Windows 10.

I'm on Windows 7 because I think it has a superior UI and because I feel it is under my control whereas Win10 is under Microsoft's control.

I have some computers where I've tried both an upgrade to Windows 10 and a switch to Linux. Both have similar problems, like trackpad not working, WLAN not working, in both cases because they only worked properly with Windows 7 drivers, so I'll keep them on Windows 7 even after Jan 2020 (I hope, at least). I just don't expect to use them for any surfing -- they will remain to be the backup machines for the tasks that don't involve browsers. They are anyway already struggling with the modern ad-laden web pages. In case I'll need surfing, maybe I'll install a VM with Linux only for that purpose, avoiding the driver issues...

And the irony was, Microsoft's "upgrade to Windows 10" program claimed they will be OK. Only afterwards, running 10, the old drivers misbehave, and the newer simply don't exist. And it's not that the hardware producer is some small company, it's Intel who doesn't want to produce newer updates of their drivers for their older hardware.

The another irony is that the Linux also has driver and desktop performance problems, resulting in WLAN not working but also local videos stuttering, if they are using more modern codecs and higher resolution: mplayer running on Windows manages to play the same videos OK which the mplayer on Linux plays unstable. So it's still https://xkcd.com/619/ "but who uses that?" even when striking out the flash word. On such desktops, VM with Linux will work, but don't expect miracles for demanding content.

Or there's option 3, which is the reason that I've had several people give me: you don't like Windows 10, because of the spying/forced updates/etc. I've converted several of these people to linux and they've been very happy with it.

The privacy issues in Windows 8/10 are a bit scary for some, so if you want to do gaming Windows 7 is your best choice.

> Or you depend on software that doesn't work any more on Win10.

I was hoping this would be about WINE.. I've seen old software run better/safer in WINE than Windows, but I'm hesitant to get involved in recommending anything to people with legacy software problems. There is virtually no upside..

We have a couple of printers and scanners which have no manufacturer support after Win7 and thus require a generic feature-limited driver under Win10.

Control of privacy, auto-updates, and MS crapware is very difficult under the moving goalposts of Win10.

Cost to shift to Win10 is high in terms of training, switching over software, dealing with new drivers, and undoing undesirable changes with each update; meanwhile end-user benefit ranges from negative to slightly positive, depending who's measuring.

I agree that switching to Linux would be worse than Win10, before even considering all the Win-only software.

> they will surely not be happy with a modern Linux distro either.

Depends on what modern Linux distro you're talking about. In fact, probably any can run with much less. It all depends on how they're configured.

I'm running Archlinux on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It's using 38.9M of its RAM right now.

I've found Alpine, AntiX, and SliTaZ Linux to be pretty snappy even on ancient machines with specs on that order of magnitude. AntiX works the best out of the box of those 3 IMO, but the other two are fine if all you want is light browsing, word processing, or servers.

There's also the Puppy Linux family and FatDog & friends which (by default) run from RAM but still provide persistence.

LXLE is another good distro for slightly better machines (ie >=1.5 ghz, >2gb RAM).

I remember we were running Win XP and Server 2000 pre-millenium. We were donated a Win 3.1 machine, and were astounded how fast it booted. Or rather it's all rather relative.

Win 10 was pared down for phone use, and the energy tweaks were welcome.

Even a very modern Debian GNU/Linux still runs tolerably well on lower specs than these. Just pick a lightweight desktop environment, and expect to set up some swap space if you're on 512MB only.

Of course the requirements of something like Alpine are a lot lower, but it's kinda hard to describe that as a general-purpose distro.

In the past I've used Xubuntu on older computers with great success, and Lubuntu on even older computers.

what's the easiest way to remove all win-10 spying? I like to keep a windows PC around for random stuff that is harder to use in Linux

And after you have fiddled the next update might very well reset it all back to Microsoft friendly settings.

Only if you pay.

> And most of those features can be turned off.

This is extremely misleading. The most dangerous (the build in spyware) or most annoying (ads!) "features" can't be turned off at all in consumer versions of windows.

You can get rid of some of the annoyances but this is nothing that can be done by the average Joe. It's even hard for dedicated computer experts to disable all the crapware in Windows 10 (and even one manages to do so, the cap will come back with the next forced update).

> Mostly I'd probably just try and find out why Windows 10 isn't a valid solution.

I have to admit this "advice" is almost as ingenious as it is diabolic… Parent is speculating here that someone who goes through all the hassle of upgrading Windows won't do the same work again to switch to some other OS afterwards.

Thanks to valve this has been the decade of the Linux gaming desktop

Could you elaborate?

Depends what you're doing - NTFS is considerably slower for many operations.

There is a team at Microsoft doing optimizations and there is another team adding ads and whatnot.

Really? KDE runs pretty well on my aging machines. Do you mean just animations and other graphical stuff?

You're going to have to back that up; like, a lot.

Aside from the few obvious things (OpenOffice being beastly and MS Office being C++ && h/w acceleration being disabled in browsers by default) there's a lot in linux that makes it largely outperform windows in equivelant tasks.

Opening files, reading from network, multi-threading, even rendering 2d windows with Wayland are demonstratively faster than on modern Windows.

> Microsoft has teams doing boring whole-system benchmarking and holistic optimization.

Facebook and Google do too and you can see how well that’s working out for their properties. Skipping bloat is a lot better than keeping it in and trying to optimize it.

My impression was that nobody ever got a raise at Microsoft for performance improvements, just new features. I'm not sure if that's true now but it certainly used to be.

Windows has a notably very slow VFS, and less than stellar internal locking in some cases (including process creation/destruction). That makes for example compilation jobs sometimes WAY more slower than on Linux.

>Microsoft has teams doing boring whole-system benchmarking and holistic optimization.

Their UX and QA teams, on the other hand, are absolutely nowhere to be found. They've arguably been on a permanent vacation since the release of Windows 8.

- I can't yet re-open all my windows that I had open when I shut down my computer in Windows (by the time I've logged in on my KDE system all of the windows I want are already open and ready for use, much like they do on a Mac).

- I can't open an Administrator command prompt with a single button when navigating a file structure in Windows. In Dolphin I always have a console as part of the window.

- I have to accept updates when Windows thinks it's time for me to accept them, and also have to deal with telemetry. These updates have undesirable effects on the system because they can flat out uninstall programs, and re-install some programs you may have removed.

- Ads for Office, Candy Crush, and some other things are pre-installed.

- The search in the Start Menu is non-deterministic and does a bunch of other stuff I don't want it to do by default, like searching the web. Open applications do not clearly show they're open (they act like the OS X dock) by default, though to be fair it was Windows 7 that introduced that default feature.

- I only have to search one Control Panel for settings, and the themeing options are better in KDE. Dark mode wasn't done as lazily as it is in Windows and the visual theme of the system is far superior.

In my experience, Linux boots up and runs faster than Windows does, but even if it was slightly slower the performance hit would honestly be worth it simply because the system is so much nicer to use and its development actually bothers to align with user goals.