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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
”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.
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).
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.
Generally UI is smoother on Windows due to the really mature desktop compositor that's light-years ahead of eg. Xorg. WDDM is actually a very good display driver model, UI crashes are really rare nowadays compared to eg. Linux (and this is not just driver quality).
So Linux is definitely faster for my development tasks, but slower when I'm scrolling in the browser.
Take an older PC, install either Windows 7 or Ubuntu, perform typical PC tasks like browsing the internet, using Excel, etc.
I have no problem with your experience differing from mine. Targeted microbenchmarks might say a lot about the difference between NTFS and ext4, but none of that really matters to me. I care about performance I can see, not performance I can measure.
> 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.
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. .
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.
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)
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...)
The Nvidia drivers are closed source, the AMD drivers are open source. The open source alternative to Nvidia drivers is not up to date or feature complete as it is not built by the company building the cards.
If you want open software you need FOSS. Nvidia is not even close to FOSS. AMD is closer to FOSS.
Just because it's closed doesn't mean the driver is bad from a purely technical/functional point of view and for many people that might be enough. The parent sounded like Nvidia GPUs just don't work well under Linux, and from my experience that's just not the case. And the open AMD drivers took many years to get to the level they are now.
Technical issues with Nvidia I can think of are the EGLStreams with Wayland and Optimus.
Why ignore Optimus for no sane reason except for the very reason that it is convenient for your argument? That's the real elephant in the room and it affects nearly every single laptop with an NVIDIA GPU in it!
Btw, have you tried using Wayland?
"""
Only the first two [standard graphics APIs] are implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver. In order to support Nvidia, Wayland compositors need to add code resembling this:
if (nvidia proprietary driver) {
/* several thousand lines of code /
} else {
/ several thousand lines of code */
}
"""
I am talking about "old" hardware that is no longer supported on Windows. The Linux kernel does not intentionally remove support for working hardware. Do you think you could get a Geforce 2 working on Windows 10? You could get it working on the latest version of Linux thanks to open source drivers (albeit reverse engineered).
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.
Or option 4, which is you signed up for the W10 update, but then it never materialized. So you are still on Windows 7 and there is still an icon in the tray telling you to reserve your free copy of W10.
Any game you play, particularly the ones running through distribution platforms like Steam, is wired up with enough telemetry that it would make Windows 10 blush. And they run with full privilege a lot of the time, too.
So if you are on Windows 7 'for privacy considerations', but use it as a gaming machine, then I have a bridge to sell you.
>so if you want to do gaming Windows 7 is your best choice.
maybe for next year or so. For one, it's reaching EOL so no security patches. There's extended support to 2023 but it costs $$$ and it's uncertain how reliably you could pirate it. Even if you ignore security patches, you're going to have to deal with developers dropping support for windows 7, so there are going to be more and more games that require windows 10, and getting updated graphics drivers might be tricky.
Not really. There are games that actually do not work on Windows 7 anymore. Also, there are things like the Vive Wireless VR adapter that works only with Windows 10.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . 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.
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.
90 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadChrome ships libavcodec/ffmpeg bits because they've paid the license fees.
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://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"
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.
such as?
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.
So Linux is definitely faster for my development tasks, but slower when I'm scrolling in the browser.
The latest gnome uses wayland/mutter which is lightening fast for compositing the UI.
Take an older PC, install either Windows 7 or Ubuntu, perform typical PC tasks like browsing the internet, using Excel, etc.
I have no problem with your experience differing from mine. Targeted microbenchmarks might say a lot about the difference between NTFS and ext4, but none of that really matters to me. I care about performance I can see, not performance I can measure.
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.
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.
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...)
If you want open software you need FOSS. Nvidia is not even close to FOSS. AMD is closer to FOSS.
Just because it's closed doesn't mean the driver is bad from a purely technical/functional point of view and for many people that might be enough. The parent sounded like Nvidia GPUs just don't work well under Linux, and from my experience that's just not the case. And the open AMD drivers took many years to get to the level they are now.
Technical issues with Nvidia I can think of are the EGLStreams with Wayland and Optimus.
I'm running the closed source Nvidia drivers and everything runs 100%. I can run most games as well.
Btw, have you tried using Wayland?
""" Only the first two [standard graphics APIs] are implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver. In order to support Nvidia, Wayland compositors need to add code resembling this:
if (nvidia proprietary driver) { /* several thousand lines of code / } else { / several thousand lines of code */ } """
From: https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
https://itsfoss.com/end-of-floppy-disk-in-linux/
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.
So if you are on Windows 7 'for privacy considerations', but use it as a gaming machine, then I have a bridge to sell you.
maybe for next year or so. For one, it's reaching EOL so no security patches. There's extended support to 2023 but it costs $$$ and it's uncertain how reliably you could pirate it. Even if you ignore security patches, you're going to have to deal with developers dropping support for windows 7, so there are going to be more and more games that require windows 10, and getting updated graphics drivers might be tricky.
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..
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.
I am surprised that Windows 10 would have so low minimum requirements!
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.
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).
Win 10 was pared down for phone use, and the energy tweaks were welcome.
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.
O&O ShutUp10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
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.
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-ex...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20942038/microsoft-edge-c...
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.
> 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-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
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.
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.
Progress is great but the rapidity of obsolescence is getting intolerable.
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 . 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.