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protoman3000

Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?

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Funny you should mention Linux.

Isn't that pretty much Windows IoT LTSC?

There are even more minimal Windows versions, but easy, convenient, legal distribution is kind of tricky

That is what you're looking at.

Any more than this you get sued for distributing MS owned code.

> Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?

First: "safe" and Windows never ever matched. Not in Windows 98, not in Millenium, not in Vista. Not ever.

I, reluctantly, after having confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and replacing it with a Chromebook about two years ago (which still works fine for her btw), ordered her a new desktop PC six months ago, running Windows 11.

Six months.

Six months is all it took for this piece of shit to become infected to the point of being unusable. Malware over malware took over: whatever 0-click or 1-click exploit in Edge that took over the machine and tells her to call indian scam center to help her "get her PC rid of viruses", blinking left and right, covering half the screen.

In other words: good old Windows. It's 20-fucking-25, nearly 26, and Microsoft still cannot ship an OS that's not rooted when a grandma is browsing for less than six months.

Pathetic.

Windows is a mediocre piece of insecure (and now spying) turd.

I fully agree with you: reliable Linux distros are the Windows replacement.

And as we've reached a point where everyone except some part of the corporate world can do everything they need from an Android smartphone and these same people are just fine with a Linux distro on their laptop or desktop, people can be switched. And some are. And the numbers of "desktop Linux" users are slowly but surely growing.

I don't care about the snarky "2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop". Linux conquered everything: all the servers, all the routers, 500 of the world top 500 supercomputers, etc. Linux shall conquer the laptop and the desktop too.

And those who don't switch have two choices: MacOS (pricey hardware) or be slaves to that turdery on bits that Windows is.

P.S: actually I don't even care: be it Linux or MacOS or BeOS or Atari's TOS: anything but Microsoft.

My mother is almost 80, bless her heart.

I gave her an iPad Owh, 10 years ago? And I’ve never had to troubleshoot her system ever again. No spyware. No viruses. Nothing.

The worst that happened recently is that the Starlink antenna had te be realigned after a particularly heavy wind blew it off the roof almost. Oh and her printer needed new toners after printing for x years without problems.

Printer model?

Why, you want to buy a new printer?

If you want inkjets, buy those with ink tanks. More expensive up front, but operating cost is so cheap. And no more "you have to replace a whole cartridge just because Magenta is low"; if Magenta is low, buy a bottle of Magenta, and fill.

For laser printers, buy those whose toner cartridges are separate from the drum, and those whose toner cartridges can be reset mechanically. And refillable.

My go-to brand for printers is Brother, btw.

A classic that's still true:

https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

Mine is... 15+ years old? I replaced the toner once. And it doesn't have Ethernet or WiFi, so I bought Printopia for my iMac (to which it's attached) to enable AirPrint.

Safe and computing never ever matched.

Safe and living also doesn't match.

We created computing to be fast, not safe. We could have made it safe, but we didn't, it was not a priority.

We can't say the same about living, because we have not created living.

Your comment makes zero sense.

Can you please sell me your infected grandma machine for $100k? I want to get that 0-click from it and sell it for $1M to a vulnerability broker.

I even offer to hire your gradma, she seems really good at locating very valuable 0-days online.

Windows security is just fine. The problem is that many users are willing to uncritically install anything they get asked to, even to the point of directly installing malware when "Microsoft support" contacts them asking them to do so. Absolutely nothing about Linux or any other general purpose OS protects against this threat vector, and if Linux had the market share Windows does you would be saying the exact same stuff about your grandma getting rootkits on her Ubuntu box. Mobile devices protect against this scenario by not trusting the user and heavily restricting what apps can do, but that's not a good model for a general purpose computer.

> if Linux had the market share Windows does you would be saying the exact same stuff about your grandma getting rootkits on her Ubuntu box

To some extent. I am not convinced it would be as bad.

For one thing, Linux is less of a monoculture.

For another, you can lock it down more for that type of user. You can set it up to make it hard to install anything from outside trusted repos.

You can lock down Windows too, you can restrict it to Windows Store only, you can allow only whitelisted apps to be installed, you can lock down user permissions, ...

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