Apple and Microsoft are both extremely predatory these days. They increasingly surveil everything we do on our devices, and routinely shove "features" we don't want upon us.
Everything is Opt Out, instead of Opt In - because they know most folks are either going to not bother to change it or just won't even know it's a setting they can change.
Add to that the various bloat and nonsense that, particularly Windows, decides to clutter up the OS with and you're left with a pair of companies with huge market share but increasingly non-consumer stances.
Well, I'm dipping my toes into the world of Linux again. I've used Ubuntu and other Linux OS's before, well over a decade ago and they were great. They had a few downsides then, which made me switch back to Windows... but today's Linux community is more accessible than ever.
So, I spent yesterday and this morning pulling out my old Alienware15 laptop. It was a great laptop when I got it, but over the years has ended up becoming uselessly slow. Windows takes upwards of 15 minutes to load sufficiently for me to do anything on it, and then every task is also slow.
But, what can that old Alienware do when I remove Windows and install something else? Well, it was time to find out.
My first pick was to try out the free version of Zorin OS, which looked like it had a lot of great features and support. It's still a Beginner Friendly operating system, and is based on Ubuntu which I already have some experience with even if it's a decade old.
Flashing a USB with the ISO, getting to the boot menu, and every step was easy as pie.
So, I opted to wipe the drive entirely and install Zorin on my Alienware.
It was at this point I ran into an issue. Zorin, for whatever reason, would fail on a read/write error during install.
That's a problem, since the order of operations I took was to first Wipe Everything And Format The Drive, and THEN Install Zorin.
So I'm left with the worst of both worlds. No Windows OS, and no Zorin OS.
After a few hours of troubleshooting, I stumbled upon a forum post from another guy who had the same issue. Turned out for them it was just that the thumbdrive they were using wasn't speedy enough to install Zorin but DID work for other Linux distros. They had partitioned part of their hd for Linux and were dual-booting with windows, so for them the solution was just to make an even smaller partition, tell it that it was a usb bootable device, and then put the ISO on that - which had the sufficient read/write speed to install Zorin without issues.
Now, I at this point don't have any working OS on the laptop, so that's out for me... but, if other linux distros worked on that guy's thumbdrive... why wouldn't they work on mine?
With that in mind, I looked up some other Ubuntu-based distros to try. Mint came highly recommended by a guy who I know switched a year ago and plays a ton of Dwarf Fortress (BlindIRL on Youtube). Given that I've seen his success in getting everything up and running on Mint - and given that he had the same or less experience with Linux as I did - it seemed like a good option to try.
And so... now I have Mint running on a laptop that otherwise was destined for recycling or garbage. It is an immediate and very noticeable improvement, and a lot of the games I'd want to play on this are still fine to do so even with a dated videocard. All of my software I use for videos works on Linux now. All of the browsers I like work flawlessly... and a TON of the solutions are straight up open source and free.
It is a very simple transition from Windows, there's been so far no real issues at all, and the quality of life features we kind of know and expect from a modern Windows OS are all baked into Mint (and a ton of other linux options).
I know this will be an improvement for me, and I think you should all consider jumping ship too. Start by dual-booting linux and windows, and just see how you like it... and if you find that it doesn't change your process... drop the Windows part. Enjoy an OS that isn't going to bloat until it's a sluggish mess.
You're already here because you own the things you write here.
Why should that stop at your blog? Take back ownership of your laptops and computers, too.
