5 ms·

In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives: Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS An

In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives: Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS And probably some others I haven't heard of. Using Windows in 2025 AND complaining about it is complaining about a self inflicted wound.

Tempest1981 11mo ago
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
- dullcrisp 11mo ago
  I think Linux is the most popular of the alternatives listed.
  - xeromal 11mo ago
    How do I download linux
    - Tempest1981 11mo ago
      Yep. Top search result was this, amusing: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install But 2nd was this: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
    - dullcrisp 11mo ago
      Looks like from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.zip https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.... but you could also try Ubuntu.
    - eYrKEC2 11mo ago
      As your first experience, I think Ubuntu is the easiest. Download it here: https://ubuntu.com/desktop https://ubuntu.com/desktop Spring for a new hard drive, just in case you hate it with the fires of a thousand suns and need to go back. Then you just swap back to your old hard drive.
      - kristianp 11mo ago
        I can also recommend Kubuntu if the gnome UI of ubuntu seems too phone-like. If using a laptop where addinga 2nd drive may be too difficult, I have just shrunk the windows partition before running the ubuntu installer.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit. It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
- askvictor 11mo ago
  There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements. The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
mr_person 11mo ago
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint. I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
- prmoustache 11mo ago
  Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer. Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
- prmoustache 11mo ago
  Most people are fine with the web version of Powerpoint.
brooke2k 11mo ago
Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.
- db48x 11mo ago
  True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
  - detritus 11mo ago
    What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software. I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
    - mistercheph 11mo ago
      You are a digital serf, dependent on the good will and love of a lord that gives you access in exchange for a tax. I really wish free(libre) tools existed that allowed you to do your work. Hopefully they will in the future, I am sure someone has tried/is trying to build them.
    - tombert 11mo ago
      I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux. Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
      - detritus 10mo ago
        I don't get the advertising thing - I don't see any at all on Windows 10?
XorNot 11mo ago
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent. If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
- robby_w_g 11mo ago
  Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough. I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease. There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
some-guy 11mo ago
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word. Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Does TurboTax still distribute DVDs? I thought it was entirely online now.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue. To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install. [1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/install-turbotax/ https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...
    - prmoustache 10mo ago
      I don't know turbotax but in the 3 last countries where I lived your do your tax either through some java software whose installation on linux is also described or on a web page.
- edg5000 11mo ago
  To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office. I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great. At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
tombert 11mo ago
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use. I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
- Levitz 11mo ago
  >I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that... Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response. I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
  - antod 11mo ago
    >Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response. Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem. BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
    - tombert 11mo ago
      > BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
stephen_g 11mo ago
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
Jigsy 11mo ago
Haiku is very pleasing in an eyecandy sort of way, but that's sadly all it has going for it. I personally wouldn't use it as a serious OS.
- tombert 11mo ago
  I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach. Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc. I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready". I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.

Tempest1981 11mo ago

I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)

dullcrisp 11mo ago
I think Linux is the most popular of the alternatives listed.
- xeromal 11mo ago
  How do I download linux
  - Tempest1981 11mo ago
    Yep. Top search result was this, amusing: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install But 2nd was this: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
  - dullcrisp 11mo ago
    Looks like from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.zip https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.... but you could also try Ubuntu.
  - eYrKEC2 11mo ago
    As your first experience, I think Ubuntu is the easiest. Download it here: https://ubuntu.com/desktop https://ubuntu.com/desktop Spring for a new hard drive, just in case you hate it with the fires of a thousand suns and need to go back. Then you just swap back to your old hard drive.
    - kristianp 11mo ago
      I can also recommend Kubuntu if the gnome UI of ubuntu seems too phone-like. If using a laptop where addinga 2nd drive may be too difficult, I have just shrunk the windows partition before running the ubuntu installer.
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit. It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
askvictor 11mo ago
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements. The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.

mr_person 11mo ago

The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint. I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.

prmoustache 11mo ago
Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer. Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
prmoustache 11mo ago
Most people are fine with the web version of Powerpoint.

brooke2k 11mo ago

Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.

db48x 11mo ago
True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
- detritus 11mo ago
  What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software. I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
  - mistercheph 11mo ago
    You are a digital serf, dependent on the good will and love of a lord that gives you access in exchange for a tax. I really wish free(libre) tools existed that allowed you to do your work. Hopefully they will in the future, I am sure someone has tried/is trying to build them.
  - tombert 11mo ago
    I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux. Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
    - detritus 10mo ago
      I don't get the advertising thing - I don't see any at all on Windows 10?

XorNot 11mo ago

I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent. If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.

robby_w_g 11mo ago
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough. I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease. There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.

some-guy 11mo ago

My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word. Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.

SoftTalker 11mo ago
Does TurboTax still distribute DVDs? I thought it was entirely online now.
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue. To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install. [1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/install-turbotax/ https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...
  - prmoustache 10mo ago
    I don't know turbotax but in the 3 last countries where I lived your do your tax either through some java software whose installation on linux is also described or on a web page.
edg5000 11mo ago
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office. I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great. At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.

tombert 11mo ago

Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use. I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...

Levitz 11mo ago
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that... Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response. I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
- antod 11mo ago
  >Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response. Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem. BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
  - tombert 11mo ago
    > BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.

stephen_g 11mo ago

I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.

Jigsy 11mo ago

Haiku is very pleasing in an eyecandy sort of way, but that's sadly all it has going for it. I personally wouldn't use it as a serious OS.

tombert 11mo ago
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach. Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc. I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready". I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.