7 ms·

Replace Windows 7 with Linux

47 points by baal80spam 7y ago

weystrom 7y ago
Call me when there's hardware video acceleration in browsers available.
- zelon88 7y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - kcb 7y ago
    There's no hardware video acceleration in browsers on linux.
    - toun 7y ago
      There is in Firefox, but you have to force it via about:config because it's disabled by default.
      - baal80spam 7y ago
        Well, guess there is a reason for it being disabled by default - like compatiblity or stability?
        kevingadd 7y ago
        Most likely patents. Firefox only has video acceleration on Windows if you have codecs installed already (because the codec people paid the patent license fees) and the acceleration relies entirely on the codec+driver combo. Chrome ships libavcodec/ffmpeg bits because they've paid the license fees.
        dx87 7y ago
        I think it's unstable. I had to disable it because it was causing frequent reboots that wouldn't stop until the computer was powered off long enough that the memory cleared out. Even if I booted into Windows after the forced reboot, it would still continually reboot. I don't know what the issue was, but it stopped after disabling hardware acceleration.
      - crispinb 7y ago
        It doesn't work on linux installations I've had around. The experience of watching in-browser videos on linux is too poor to bother with (it's hot enough as is in an Australian summer). I either download (youtube-dl etc) or use my tablet (for smaller ad hoc things) instead.
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        What setting is this? Afaik there is hardware accelerated drawing, but no VAAPI. There used to be some kludge back when gstreamer was the backend, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work now we’re using FFmpeg.
        toun 7y ago
        Sorry you're right. I thought parent was refering to accelerated drawing, not decoding. That said, for my use case, this is all I need on a work laptop. My desktop CPU doesn't break a sweat on software decoding, so I'm not too bothered.
    - hyperion2010 7y ago
      This is blatantly false.
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        Unfortunately it isn’t. You need to patch chromium to get VAAPI support (the library that leverages the hardware decoding in your cpu/gpu), and firefox doesn’t support it at all. There is hardware accelerated drawing, but decoding is all done on the CPU for the most part. It’s even more of a mess when dealing with nvidia which has its own decoding library.
        hyperion2010 7y ago
        Ah, reading a sibling I see they mean decoding not just 3d acceleration. Indeed that is a pit, though youtube-dl and mpv do a pretty good job for a subset of content.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      In my case, it is enabled by default in Chromium if you have a libva installed, which I think most desktop distros do.
    - sz4kerto 7y ago
      Correct. Most people misunderstand this and think that hardware accelerated drawing is all what they need, but there's another element: decoding. No browsers support (officially) hw-accelerated video decoding on Linux. Compare CPU usage of 4K in-browser video playback on Win and on Linux, the difference is major. On Linux, one CPU core is almost maxed out when playing 4K, on Windows the CPU barely does anything. You can patch Chromium but no distros ship it like that. If you'd like I'm happy to provide references to Chromium and Firefox bugtrackers that support the above. Eg.: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 "Enable VAVDA by default on Linux for VA-API-assisted HW video decode Currently there are no plans to do this"
      - downtide 7y ago
        That's horrible to know. How does something like the Chromecast do this then, if it is just a glorified browser?
      - downtide 7y ago
        Another good reason to pop out video. I hate watching it in the browser, I just want to send it to my preferred player.
nikanj 7y ago
”Almost any computer running Linux will operate faster and be more secure than the same computer running Windows.” Mostly not true in my experience. Microsoft has teams doing boring whole-system benchmarking and holistic optimization. No similar central authority for performance exists on Linux. A feature-equivalent KDE Desktop runs like a pig compared to Windows.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Depends what you're doing - NTFS is considerably slower for many operations.
  - sedatk 7y ago
    > NTFS is considerably slower for many operations such as?
    - sz4kerto 7y ago
      Opening many small files. That's a design decision by the way - opening a file on NTFS involves a whole bunch of stuff like letting "filters" to be injected between the program and the OS. This is what makes virus scanners and on-demand cloud storage like OneDrive work. It's a good model for some use cases (eg. above), and not as good for others (compiling C++ projects).
- haolez 7y ago
  There is a team at Microsoft doing optimizations and there is another team adding ads and whatnot.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Really? KDE runs pretty well on my aging machines. Do you mean just animations and other graphical stuff?
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    Linux also has the benefit of multiple configurations. You can get Linux to run on much older hardware using more baisc DEs
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
If you're still on Win 7, presumably you are very change averse. Or you depend on software that doesn't work any more on Win10. Those are the only obvious reasons that come to mind. In either case, switching to Linux would be the worst case scenario, and significantly worse than upgrading to Win10. .
- bgorman 7y ago
  Linux might have better device driver support than Windows 10.
  - Hydraulix989 7y ago
    That's definitely not true if you're using an NVIDIA GPU.
    - SXX 7y ago
      I'm not a big fan of proprietary software in general, but to be honest Nvidia proprietary driver is decent software as long as it's not laptop and you're running stable distribution.
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        Annoyingly this is relatively true. Nvidia’s driver works very well for servers and desktops, but the moment you’re on a laptop or you want to use Wayland you’re totally fucked. I have a dell precision with a quadro p2000 that I’ve owned for two years, and only last month has it become properly supported by Nvidia’s driver. Secure boot is also a massive problem (which can be sorta solved with MOKutil, but it’s messy)
    - HansHamster 7y ago
      I'm really curious why so many people complain about Nvidia GPUs under linux. I've been running several Nvidia cards under linux over the last 10+ years without any serious issues. Back in the day Nvidia was really the only option and Fglrx was a total mess (So it's really nice to see how AMD cards under linux are now coming along...). And I don't have the impression that the quality has gone down over the years. But is it because many distros don't ship with the Nvidia drivers and then people run into issues with Nouveau, or break something by installing the closed source driver manually or from a 3rd party repository and then get incompatible/broken libraries, wrong kernel versions and stuff like that? Or is there really something wrong with the drivers themselves? (let's ignore optimus...)
52-hertz_whale 7y ago
2020. The year of the Linux desktop.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Thanks to valve this has been the decade of the Linux gaming desktop
  - windsurfer 7y ago
    This is true. With Valve's Proton improvements you often get even better performance with Linux than Windows.
llarsson 7y ago
If people really use computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM and a CPU slower than a single gigahertz, they will surely not be happy with a modern Linux distro either. I am surprised that Windows 10 would have so low minimum requirements!
- jolmg 7y ago
  > 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.
- vector_spaces 7y ago
  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).
- downtide 7y ago
  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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  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.
- barbs 7y ago
  In the past I've used Xubuntu on older computers with great success, and Lubuntu on even older computers.
butz 7y ago
With improved support for games (thanks to Proton from Valve) Linux is actually the best alternative to Windows 7. And to get Windows 10 running as you'd like (remove telemetry, crapware, etc.) there's probably even more work fiddling with configuration than setting up Linux.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  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
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    Setup a firewall on another device and only whitelist the traffic you want.
  - Windows7_4life 7y ago
    WPD (Windows Privacy Dashboard) https://wpd.app/ https://wpd.app/ O&O ShutUp10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
  - dessant 7y ago
    This project is excellent for configuring a lean Windows 10 instance: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
  - still_grokking 7y ago
    An air gap… This won't remove the spyware, but at least it won't be able to call home. A "virtual" air gap a.k.a. "VM without network card" is a viable option, too.
  - number6 7y ago
    https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/Cyber-Security/Recommendations/SiSyPHuS_Win10/SiSyPHuS_node.html https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/Cyber-Security/Recommendat...
- 7y ago
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Windows 10 performs better than Windows 7 in most cases on lower end hardware. The only upgrade you'll want is a cheap $35 SSD: Windows 10 runs terribly on spinning disks in particular.
Windows7_4life 7y ago
>In less than two months, Windows 7 will enter end of life. Not exactly, Windows 7 ESU[0] support ends in 2023 Moreover, stable release date for Edge browser is January 15th 2020[1] and will support Windows 7 as well. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-windows-7-extended-security-updates-available-to-all-business-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-windows-7-ex... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20942038/microsoft-edge-chromium-release-date-new-logo-features https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20942038/microsoft-edge-c...
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Only if you pay.
bureaucrat 7y ago
Fun fact: Engineers + Linux costs more than buying a bunch of Windows 10 copies with basic sysadmins.
FpUser 7y ago
Here we go again. The support will end. The mayhem will ensue. The world will fall apart. But thou shalt be saved if adopts to my (insert your pet piece of technology here ). People will figure what they need and why without FUD articles.
downtide 7y ago
Yep, managed an afternoon with 10, and I'm not one to usually give up, but due to my chipset not being supported which made shutting down difficult, I turned it off and have never booted that drive since. I have Win 8 and 8.1 on other devices, that have seen similar neglect. I have no desire to boot Windows at all. I've got a print queue stacking up mind.
squeaky-clean 7y ago
While I agree with the rest of the article, this bit isn't true > Your Windows 7 is likely running on an older machine that might struggle with a resource hungry operating system like Windows 10. > To run Windows 10, you need a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit RAM, 16 GB for 32-bit OS or 20 GB for 64-bit OS, and a 800 x 600 resolution display. And that’s just a bare minimum. Windows 7 has the exact same minimum specs. And in my experience, Windows 10 runs better on a system meeting the minimum specs than Windows 7. Of course neither of them comes close to something like Lubuntu or Puppy Linux, but that's a different tanget. They also recommend Ubuntu as a first distro (which I agree is a good choice for newbies), but I moved away from Ubuntu to other distros during 16.04 because of how bloated it was. The Unity UI was sooooo slow on low end hardware. Is it still that way? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10737/windows-7-system-requirements https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10737/windows-7-sys... > 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor* > 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) > 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) > DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
SahAssar 7y ago
This is basically blogspam fueled by the Win7 EOL to get more people to try vivaldi. Personally the Win7 part feels like FUD to get people to try vivaldi, but that might just be my reading of it.
teunispeters 7y ago
From working with multiple platforms: - switching to linux is a good call if upstream tools have been abandoned. In this case WINE is a good toolkit for windows tools needed. Figuring out which linux is best - Ubuntu and Fedora have the most industry support though. - switching to Windows 10 should probably be tested first. Performance-wise it's comparable to 7 in most scenarios and while its UI with all the ads and "bling" is confusing it's at least somewhat consistent and probably the shallowest learning curve. And most of those features can be turned off. Mostly I'd probably just try and find out why Windows 10 isn't a valid solution. They've reduced its memory and CPU requirements to fairly comparable to Windows 7, in most circumstances. Most of the rest of the comments I've seen here are FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) arguments based on fallacies. I know people have reasons to dislike windows or linux (I personally cannot stand working in windows 10 except for to play video games), but that's personal bias and it has no place in giving advice.
- still_grokking 7y ago
  > 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.
superkuh 7y ago
Funny, I was just thinking of switching from linux back to windows, after 20 years, because the backwards incompatibility and breakdown in modern linux package management and C++x extensions has made things very difficult. The proliferation of all the containerized solutions (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) tries to address it but just makes it worse. It's gotten to the point where linux software written today can't be compiled run on a linux distro more than 5 years old. Progress is great but the rapidity of obsolescence is getting intolerable.
wayneftw 7y ago
For new users and really for anyone - I'd recommend Manjaro over Ubuntu. I've been giving Linux desktops a shot for over a decade and I finally switched a year ago because installing software on Manjaro is so easy compared to any other distro I've used. It's also been rock solid on 2 of my desktop systems and 1 laptop, with all the features that I want working, including power management and advanced touchpad gestures. Recently as an experiment I tried Xubuntu again when someone here pointed out how you can't get .NET Core 3.0 working on Manjaro yet - however, after (painfully) setting up Xubuntu with my standard kit of software including docker, vscode, beyond compare, programming languages, and UI tweakers like xdotool, wmctrl among very many others - after 1 or 2 weeks - it wouldn't boot (due to a bad update?) Not the first time I've had this happen with Ubuntu. Then I replaced Xubuntu with Manjaro, did the same setup in half the time in order to figure out which .NET Core 3.0 packages to install without messing with my other machines. I figured i out -the correct packages end in -bin, e.g. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dotnet-sdk-bin https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dotnet-sdk-bin . Everything has been fine for a few weeks now, just like my other 3 machines... Maybe I setup Xubuntu incorrectly. I didn't use the Snap software distributions available through Xubuntu's default GUI installer. I used the command line at first and i installed Synaptics, added separate repositories for various publishers... I might have used a mix of CLI and GUI to install stuff. If I had only used what the default installer offered, things might have been stable for longer... But I used both CLI and GUI to install stuff on my other Manjaro stations and didn't have any of these problems, so that's why I recommend it. Also, XFCE does a clean and simple Windows style GUI better than Windows 10, where I normally have to install "7+ taskbar tweaker" to get the taskbar features that I like, such as middle clicking to close a window in the taskbar or allowing me to drag and drop taskbar items to arrange them instead of forcing them into groups.
agounaris 7y ago
You are all too geeks to get that people who are still on windows 7, they don't access hacker news, they have no clue what vivaldi is and probably will never update to anything else, they will just throw the machine away and get a new one.

47 points by baal80spam 7y ago

weystrom 7y ago

Call me when there's hardware video acceleration in browsers available.

zelon88 7y ago
Could you elaborate?
- kcb 7y ago
  There's no hardware video acceleration in browsers on linux.
  - toun 7y ago
    There is in Firefox, but you have to force it via about:config because it's disabled by default.
    - baal80spam 7y ago
      Well, guess there is a reason for it being disabled by default - like compatiblity or stability?
      - kevingadd 7y ago
        Most likely patents. Firefox only has video acceleration on Windows if you have codecs installed already (because the codec people paid the patent license fees) and the acceleration relies entirely on the codec+driver combo. Chrome ships libavcodec/ffmpeg bits because they've paid the license fees.
      - dx87 7y ago
        I think it's unstable. I had to disable it because it was causing frequent reboots that wouldn't stop until the computer was powered off long enough that the memory cleared out. Even if I booted into Windows after the forced reboot, it would still continually reboot. I don't know what the issue was, but it stopped after disabling hardware acceleration.
    - crispinb 7y ago
      It doesn't work on linux installations I've had around. The experience of watching in-browser videos on linux is too poor to bother with (it's hot enough as is in an Australian summer). I either download (youtube-dl etc) or use my tablet (for smaller ad hoc things) instead.
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      What setting is this? Afaik there is hardware accelerated drawing, but no VAAPI. There used to be some kludge back when gstreamer was the backend, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work now we’re using FFmpeg.
      - toun 7y ago
        Sorry you're right. I thought parent was refering to accelerated drawing, not decoding. That said, for my use case, this is all I need on a work laptop. My desktop CPU doesn't break a sweat on software decoding, so I'm not too bothered.
  - hyperion2010 7y ago
    This is blatantly false.
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      Unfortunately it isn’t. You need to patch chromium to get VAAPI support (the library that leverages the hardware decoding in your cpu/gpu), and firefox doesn’t support it at all. There is hardware accelerated drawing, but decoding is all done on the CPU for the most part. It’s even more of a mess when dealing with nvidia which has its own decoding library.
      - hyperion2010 7y ago
        Ah, reading a sibling I see they mean decoding not just 3d acceleration. Indeed that is a pit, though youtube-dl and mpv do a pretty good job for a subset of content.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    In my case, it is enabled by default in Chromium if you have a libva installed, which I think most desktop distros do.
  - sz4kerto 7y ago
    Correct. Most people misunderstand this and think that hardware accelerated drawing is all what they need, but there's another element: decoding. No browsers support (officially) hw-accelerated video decoding on Linux. Compare CPU usage of 4K in-browser video playback on Win and on Linux, the difference is major. On Linux, one CPU core is almost maxed out when playing 4K, on Windows the CPU barely does anything. You can patch Chromium but no distros ship it like that. If you'd like I'm happy to provide references to Chromium and Firefox bugtrackers that support the above. Eg.: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 "Enable VAVDA by default on Linux for VA-API-assisted HW video decode Currently there are no plans to do this"
    - downtide 7y ago
      That's horrible to know. How does something like the Chromecast do this then, if it is just a glorified browser?
    - downtide 7y ago
      Another good reason to pop out video. I hate watching it in the browser, I just want to send it to my preferred player.

nikanj 7y ago

”Almost any computer running Linux will operate faster and be more secure than the same computer running Windows.” Mostly not true in my experience. Microsoft has teams doing boring whole-system benchmarking and holistic optimization. No similar central authority for performance exists on Linux. A feature-equivalent KDE Desktop runs like a pig compared to Windows.

pjc50 7y ago
Depends what you're doing - NTFS is considerably slower for many operations.
- sedatk 7y ago
  > NTFS is considerably slower for many operations such as?
  - sz4kerto 7y ago
    Opening many small files. That's a design decision by the way - opening a file on NTFS involves a whole bunch of stuff like letting "filters" to be injected between the program and the OS. This is what makes virus scanners and on-demand cloud storage like OneDrive work. It's a good model for some use cases (eg. above), and not as good for others (compiling C++ projects).
haolez 7y ago
There is a team at Microsoft doing optimizations and there is another team adding ads and whatnot.
zarkov99 7y ago
Really? KDE runs pretty well on my aging machines. Do you mean just animations and other graphical stuff?
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Linux also has the benefit of multiple configurations. You can get Linux to run on much older hardware using more baisc DEs

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

If you're still on Win 7, presumably you are very change averse. Or you depend on software that doesn't work any more on Win10. Those are the only obvious reasons that come to mind. In either case, switching to Linux would be the worst case scenario, and significantly worse than upgrading to Win10. .

bgorman 7y ago
Linux might have better device driver support than Windows 10.
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  That's definitely not true if you're using an NVIDIA GPU.
  - SXX 7y ago
    I'm not a big fan of proprietary software in general, but to be honest Nvidia proprietary driver is decent software as long as it's not laptop and you're running stable distribution.
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      Annoyingly this is relatively true. Nvidia’s driver works very well for servers and desktops, but the moment you’re on a laptop or you want to use Wayland you’re totally fucked. I have a dell precision with a quadro p2000 that I’ve owned for two years, and only last month has it become properly supported by Nvidia’s driver. Secure boot is also a massive problem (which can be sorta solved with MOKutil, but it’s messy)
  - HansHamster 7y ago
    I'm really curious why so many people complain about Nvidia GPUs under linux. I've been running several Nvidia cards under linux over the last 10+ years without any serious issues. Back in the day Nvidia was really the only option and Fglrx was a total mess (So it's really nice to see how AMD cards under linux are now coming along...). And I don't have the impression that the quality has gone down over the years. But is it because many distros don't ship with the Nvidia drivers and then people run into issues with Nouveau, or break something by installing the closed source driver manually or from a 3rd party repository and then get incompatible/broken libraries, wrong kernel versions and stuff like that? Or is there really something wrong with the drivers themselves? (let's ignore optimus...)

52-hertz_whale 7y ago

2020. The year of the Linux desktop.

jdnenej 7y ago
Thanks to valve this has been the decade of the Linux gaming desktop
- windsurfer 7y ago
  This is true. With Valve's Proton improvements you often get even better performance with Linux than Windows.

llarsson 7y ago

If people really use computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM and a CPU slower than a single gigahertz, they will surely not be happy with a modern Linux distro either. I am surprised that Windows 10 would have so low minimum requirements!

jolmg 7y ago
> 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.
vector_spaces 7y ago
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).
downtide 7y ago
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.
zozbot234 7y ago
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.
barbs 7y ago
In the past I've used Xubuntu on older computers with great success, and Lubuntu on even older computers.

butz 7y ago

With improved support for games (thanks to Proton from Valve) Linux is actually the best alternative to Windows 7. And to get Windows 10 running as you'd like (remove telemetry, crapware, etc.) there's probably even more work fiddling with configuration than setting up Linux.

OrgNet 7y ago
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
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  Setup a firewall on another device and only whitelist the traffic you want.
- Windows7_4life 7y ago
  WPD (Windows Privacy Dashboard) https://wpd.app/ https://wpd.app/ O&O ShutUp10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
- dessant 7y ago
  This project is excellent for configuring a lean Windows 10 instance: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
- still_grokking 7y ago
  An air gap… This won't remove the spyware, but at least it won't be able to call home. A "virtual" air gap a.k.a. "VM without network card" is a viable option, too.
- number6 7y ago
  https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/Cyber-Security/Recommendations/SiSyPHuS_Win10/SiSyPHuS_node.html https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/Cyber-Security/Recommendat...
7y ago

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Windows 10 performs better than Windows 7 in most cases on lower end hardware. The only upgrade you'll want is a cheap $35 SSD: Windows 10 runs terribly on spinning disks in particular.

Windows7_4life 7y ago

>In less than two months, Windows 7 will enter end of life. Not exactly, Windows 7 ESU[0] support ends in 2023 Moreover, stable release date for Edge browser is January 15th 2020[1] and will support Windows 7 as well. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-windows-7-extended-security-updates-available-to-all-business-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-windows-7-ex... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20942038/microsoft-edge-chromium-release-date-new-logo-features https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20942038/microsoft-edge-c...

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Only if you pay.

bureaucrat 7y ago

Fun fact: Engineers + Linux costs more than buying a bunch of Windows 10 copies with basic sysadmins.

FpUser 7y ago

Here we go again. The support will end. The mayhem will ensue. The world will fall apart. But thou shalt be saved if adopts to my (insert your pet piece of technology here ). People will figure what they need and why without FUD articles.

downtide 7y ago

Yep, managed an afternoon with 10, and I'm not one to usually give up, but due to my chipset not being supported which made shutting down difficult, I turned it off and have never booted that drive since. I have Win 8 and 8.1 on other devices, that have seen similar neglect. I have no desire to boot Windows at all. I've got a print queue stacking up mind.

squeaky-clean 7y ago

While I agree with the rest of the article, this bit isn't true > Your Windows 7 is likely running on an older machine that might struggle with a resource hungry operating system like Windows 10. > To run Windows 10, you need a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit RAM, 16 GB for 32-bit OS or 20 GB for 64-bit OS, and a 800 x 600 resolution display. And that’s just a bare minimum. Windows 7 has the exact same minimum specs. And in my experience, Windows 10 runs better on a system meeting the minimum specs than Windows 7. Of course neither of them comes close to something like Lubuntu or Puppy Linux, but that's a different tanget. They also recommend Ubuntu as a first distro (which I agree is a good choice for newbies), but I moved away from Ubuntu to other distros during 16.04 because of how bloated it was. The Unity UI was sooooo slow on low end hardware. Is it still that way? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10737/windows-7-system-requirements https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10737/windows-7-sys... > 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor* > 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) > 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) > DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

SahAssar 7y ago

This is basically blogspam fueled by the Win7 EOL to get more people to try vivaldi. Personally the Win7 part feels like FUD to get people to try vivaldi, but that might just be my reading of it.

teunispeters 7y ago

From working with multiple platforms: - switching to linux is a good call if upstream tools have been abandoned. In this case WINE is a good toolkit for windows tools needed. Figuring out which linux is best - Ubuntu and Fedora have the most industry support though. - switching to Windows 10 should probably be tested first. Performance-wise it's comparable to 7 in most scenarios and while its UI with all the ads and "bling" is confusing it's at least somewhat consistent and probably the shallowest learning curve. And most of those features can be turned off. Mostly I'd probably just try and find out why Windows 10 isn't a valid solution. They've reduced its memory and CPU requirements to fairly comparable to Windows 7, in most circumstances. Most of the rest of the comments I've seen here are FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) arguments based on fallacies. I know people have reasons to dislike windows or linux (I personally cannot stand working in windows 10 except for to play video games), but that's personal bias and it has no place in giving advice.

still_grokking 7y ago
> 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.

superkuh 7y ago

Funny, I was just thinking of switching from linux back to windows, after 20 years, because the backwards incompatibility and breakdown in modern linux package management and C++x extensions has made things very difficult. The proliferation of all the containerized solutions (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) tries to address it but just makes it worse. It's gotten to the point where linux software written today can't be compiled run on a linux distro more than 5 years old. Progress is great but the rapidity of obsolescence is getting intolerable.

wayneftw 7y ago

For new users and really for anyone - I'd recommend Manjaro over Ubuntu. I've been giving Linux desktops a shot for over a decade and I finally switched a year ago because installing software on Manjaro is so easy compared to any other distro I've used. It's also been rock solid on 2 of my desktop systems and 1 laptop, with all the features that I want working, including power management and advanced touchpad gestures. Recently as an experiment I tried Xubuntu again when someone here pointed out how you can't get .NET Core 3.0 working on Manjaro yet - however, after (painfully) setting up Xubuntu with my standard kit of software including docker, vscode, beyond compare, programming languages, and UI tweakers like xdotool, wmctrl among very many others - after 1 or 2 weeks - it wouldn't boot (due to a bad update?) Not the first time I've had this happen with Ubuntu. Then I replaced Xubuntu with Manjaro, did the same setup in half the time in order to figure out which .NET Core 3.0 packages to install without messing with my other machines. I figured i out -the correct packages end in -bin, e.g. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dotnet-sdk-bin https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dotnet-sdk-bin . Everything has been fine for a few weeks now, just like my other 3 machines... Maybe I setup Xubuntu incorrectly. I didn't use the Snap software distributions available through Xubuntu's default GUI installer. I used the command line at first and i installed Synaptics, added separate repositories for various publishers... I might have used a mix of CLI and GUI to install stuff. If I had only used what the default installer offered, things might have been stable for longer... But I used both CLI and GUI to install stuff on my other Manjaro stations and didn't have any of these problems, so that's why I recommend it. Also, XFCE does a clean and simple Windows style GUI better than Windows 10, where I normally have to install "7+ taskbar tweaker" to get the taskbar features that I like, such as middle clicking to close a window in the taskbar or allowing me to drag and drop taskbar items to arrange them instead of forcing them into groups.

agounaris 7y ago

You are all too geeks to get that people who are still on windows 7, they don't access hacker news, they have no clue what vivaldi is and probably will never update to anything else, they will just throw the machine away and get a new one.