When Windows 7 is dead in 2020 what OS will you migrate to??

Oh yeah, a recent update to win10 broke networking and some other things.
Linux is starting to look better and better, lol.

Other OS marketshares are growing, but Windows still holds ~88% of marketshare. Amazing what people will put up with.

Running a combo of linux and Win 7 over here still.

I only stick with windows because I am not all that great with programing. Dyslexic as I am, trying to put together a new Linux kernel would often lead to disaster for me. And, I find Mac more expensive then even a disastrous Windows experience.

So, IMO if you aren't a computer scientist, they got you by the kiwi's.....

Edit: Kinda like windows actually is a porcupine...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg

Installing Linux does not involve any programming. I'm a pretty hardcore Linux user and I haven't built a kernel from source for about a decade. Except for custom Android kernels but that's another thing entirely.

I would say for sure that I spend far more time and effort keeping my Windows install functioning well than I do my desktop Ubuntu install. Pretty much everything routine is way easier. Installing software, updating OS and software, even a fresh install. All easier.

Microsofts whole file system is a bodge over another bodge, the put a shiny skin over the top but it's just polishing a turd!.

Anyone remember the Amiga 500?, they managed a perfectly usable Workbench (WIMP), that could run word prcessors, paint programs, music programs etc all on 512kb!.

Windows eats 10gb to 20gb, thrashes hard drives and memory. A 4gb RAM laptop is on the edge of being usable.

Just bad design and bad programming but the get away with it..

I appreciate all the things that Windows was designed to do. I really think that Windows was perfected sometime in the 2000's. The rest of the changes are just security improvements, hardware support, reinventing the wheel with GUI changes, and built in spyware afterwards.

The same can be said of Microsoft Office. Since Office 2003, it's mostly been downhill from there.

The Microsoft of today makes it's money abusing it's monopoly position, not providing quality software. It used to be that a new version of Windows was the most exciting thing in the world. Now we dread it.

Linux is the only place you see an operating system improving and getting significantly better. Although there's plenty of room for improvement still.

keithmac said:

Anyone remember the Amiga 500?, they managed a perfectly usable Workbench (WIMP), that could run word prcessors, paint programs, music programs etc all on 512kb!

Click to expand...

I remember using 2 single sided floppy drives on a 512K Macintosh, with one 400KB floppy containing the OS and the application, and the other for user files. I think of that when I go looking for a simple utility app for my phone (e.g. bubble level, alarm clock, etc.), and find that some of the options demand 100MB or more. It confirms to me that either they're very poorly written (in which case I don't want to use them), or they're built to do something in the background that I didn't ask for (in which case I don't want to use them).

I think Windows checks both those boxes, but all the same I use Windows 7 on my laptop. It's the thing to have for maximum software availability.

Yeah, bloated apps drive me insane. These apps should fit into a few megabytes at most.

One thing i live even more than a polished linux distro is the Haiku OS.. it's based on BE OS, and is somehow compatible with linux enough that you can run libreoffice on it :O

Another cool thing is that it's single user based and boots in a few seconds.



Still under development, but promising as a kind of minimalist OS.

I had an Atari ST when they first came out. Helped me through school. As I recall it had 512k or ram that I was told could be increased by purchasing ram chips and soldering them to the existing ram. At the time I had never worked with RAM chips so I ended up taking it to a retired JPL electronics guy in Pasadena who in his capacity at JPL used to build satellites. I dropped it off and a week later I had 1meg or ram!!!!! :lol:

I think it cost me about $100 at that time.

As for Haiku, let me know when it can run the latest version of Avid Pro Tools and Media Composer....or at least Reaper

Not sure what I will use is a years time, I have played around with a few Ubuntu Linux programs.
I am paying more attention to what I use the PC for.
#1 is Internet
#2 is OpenOffice
#3 is Games on Steam - With that I will need to use a Virtual Machine, so I would probably do W10 and not activate it, or continue using W7. Thats about it, I play around with maps but thats online.
#4 is Email

Well, I just had a new one for me....

My screen went blue starting from the top and going to the bottom.

There was some QR scanner icon and text that read....windows.com/stopcode.

Windows stopcode???

The system rebooted itself and things are running again for the moment.....

Another example of the quality you can expect from modern Microsoft:

https://serverfault.com/questions/9...0-breaks-smb2-connections-to-windows-7-shares

Basically they pushed an update for Windows 7 that straight up broke the ability to connect to network file shares hosted on the computer that received the update.

As far as I can see this update was considered mandatory.

The followup update that fixes it. Optional.

I'm an ex systems administrator, so I was fairly quickly able to pin it down to Windows box, but for the casual user this would have been a real pain in the ass to fix.

Windows is NOT easy to use when it breaks itself at random like this.

Just like XP I will keep using it as long as possible. 8)

I ran XP as long as I safely could. Windows 10 is a f#$king nightmare, and this is the LAST time I run Microsoft ANYTHING. Ever.

Just installed W10 on an unused hdd, not buying shit just not activating it.

It did not take long at all to install, plus I locked it down so Microsoft can't take my info easily.

----
edit #1
I have been using it for half a day now. Just setting it up the way I like it with the background, screen savers, colors and so on.

So far I like it, I dont like the tiles on the start menu (bottom left) but I can customize it anyway I like. Even have the option to make it look like W7 I bet.

Over all; I'm finding no difference from a desktop perspective. Little things here and there will get some getting used to but no big deal.

I have not found any drawbacks from not activating it. I thought there were little down sides like not being able to change the backgrounds, but I've been able to do it. Also I do not see no watermarks anywhere.

I will probably start using it full time, my original hard drive still has W7 on it with all the word documents, pdf files.

The reason I switched over:
I did a boo boo, trying to dl tunes from a Youtube to mp3 converter and I got hit with a bunch of pop up screens trying to scare me, however they were easily shut down by restarting computer. I thought maybe they inserted a virus, so its time to move over to W10.

markz said:

I did a boo boo, trying to dl tunes from a Youtube to mp3 converter and I got hit with a bunch of pop up screens trying to scare me, however they were easily shut down by restarting computer. I thought maybe they inserted a virus, so its time to move over to W10.

Click to expand...

Use this:
https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/

The backend youtube-dl is open source and has been around about as long as youtube, and the frontend is also open source and therefore very unlikely to contain malicious code.

As a rule, when I'm looking for utility software like this for Windows, I lean towards open source stuff. Besides generally working better, if the code is on GitHub or the like it's not going to contain any surprises.

If you're super paranoid you can compile it yourself with freely available tools.

LeftieBiker said:

I ran XP as long as I safely could. Windows 10 is a f#$king nightmare, and this is the LAST time I run Microsoft ANYTHING. Ever.

Click to expand...

My opinion remains unchanged. I'll go to some flavor of Linux next.

For the last few months, been using Linux Ubuntu. Pinta instead of MS-paint, LibreOffice instead of MS-Word, all free. Reasonably happy so far.

https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62503

I also have Gimp (free), which could be considered a "photoshop lite", but I haven't needed it yet, or had time to learn it.

OpenOffice is what I installed which is free.

Libreoffice is the one you want.

Due to difficulties working with Sun Microsystems the Libreoffice project was formed to incorporate improvements that were being made by third parties trying to improve Openoffice. Nowadays Sun Microsystems is long gone and Apache Foundatation maintains Openoffice, but the lionshare of the development and improvements still revolves around the LibreOffice project.


I stopped using Windows well over a decade ago. It's pretty rare for me to have to use Windows for something, but when I do... Windows 10 isn't that bad.

There are some trends I really dislike about modern consumer-oriented operating systems. Stuff like how much advertising is incorporated into Windows now. The integrated spying and monitoring features of Windows is pretty disturbing, too. It's not hard to disable that stuff with third party software, but it's hard to know how honest Microsoft is really being about their settings when they want to monitor and track you to begin with. Plus updates re-enable all the stuff you turned off so you have to monitor the system. The push to Software-as-a-Service is not a good one for home users, either; Making people do subscription models where they pay monthly fees instead of just paying once and downloading and installing it and keeping it forever.

But since all that stuff can be turned off and/or avoided provided you don't mind disabling or breaking some features of the OS then Windows 10 seems pretty usable.

With "Windows Services for Linux" and Microsoft participating more and more with open source software and having major parts of it's core technology available on Linux then is pretty cool. There is no doubting that Microsoft is a software powerhouse with a lot of talent and skill on staff. It means that I would much rather use Windows 10 then Apple OS X.

But I really am happy with Linux and am going to stick with that. Linux has a tremendous about of irritating and bullshit things, but I really don't know how that compares to Windows 10 since I don't use Windows a whole lot. I just know that all software is terrible and Linux is no exception.

I know that technical people can benefit from Linux if they don't mind the time sink. Also people who really spend their time in a browser and social media and other normal lightweight stuff like that would have a easy time in Linux for the most part if they can get past the initial setup. It's kinda the semi-technical or people who need to get work done, but don't have the time to dedicate to figuring out how to do it in Linux are the ones that probably would have the hardest time dealing with any sort of transition.

I've noticed that using W10 when I try to connect to Steam, that it says I am trying to connect from a different computer.
Same thing would go for the free email providers too.

Thank you for reminding me of that, I knew about the Windows Updates reopening the closed doors but I just forgot about that.
Can't trust them if they are doing that, and since they are doing that what can you trust them with? Their promise that since you closed the doors that they will obey that :lol:

I've always like the feel of using W7, and now using W10 for 2 days. I am sure Linux distro's will have similar, if not exactly, the same feel of using the o/s. Like XUbuntu which I've tried out. I am familiar with the windows layout for the desktop, with the bar on the bottom, the way the browsers open, using Firefox Mozilla and DuckDuckGo. Will have to look more into Linux distro's now and try a few out. Can always use a Virtual Machine with W10 if theres something that needs to be done, but for my usage pattern that is not so. However I do have Steam games that are all from W7, so there is that.

sleepy_tired said:

There are some trends I really dislike about modern consumer-oriented operating systems. Stuff like how much advertising is incorporated into Windows now. The integrated spying and monitoring features of Windows is pretty disturbing, too. It's not hard to disable that stuff with third party software, but it's hard to know how honest Microsoft is really being about their settings when they want to monitor and track you to begin with. Plus updates re-enable all the stuff you turned off so you have to monitor the system. The push to Software-as-a-Service is not a good one for home users, either; Making people do subscription models where they pay monthly fees instead of just paying once and downloading and installing it and keeping it forever.

But since all that stuff can be turned off and/or avoided provided you don't mind disabling or breaking some features of the OS then Windows 10 seems pretty usable.

Click to expand...

markz said:

Can always use a Virtual Machine with W10 if theres something that needs to be done, but for my usage pattern that is not so. However I do have Steam games that are all from W7, so there is that.

Click to expand...

I've actually taken to the opposite, running Windows 7 on the bare iron with a VMWare VM running Ubuntu. The main reason being that I'm what you might call an "avid gamer" (addict) and my favorite games just don't work well or at all under Linux. Most of them are launched with Steam, which does have a Linux version and a fairly decent selection of games, but nowhere near as many as Windows.

Basically what I'm left with on my Windows install is VMWare Workstation, Steam, and whatever else is necessary to make my games run. I've locked Windows down fairly tight, it doesn't even have a user facing web browser left.

The VM starts up fullscreen on boot, incidentally I also have a MacOS install on another VM I can start up when people call me with Mac questions. Performance in the VM is indistinguishable from bare metal at this point, desktop computers are insanely overpowered for most applications.

I've noticed a significant reduction in the amount of housekeeping I need to do to maintain Windows in this configuration, there's basically no applications installed to need manually updating, Steam updates itself and it's games. VMWare isn't something that gets very frequent updates, and when it does it's a pretty smooth process.

No Java, no Flash, no browsers, eliminates a huge portion of the potential security issues you encounter using Windows normally. Most of what's left is handled by Windows Update.

Of course I'd prefer to ditch Windows altogether or at least relegate it to a VM under Linux, but I really loves my games.

Steam support in Linux has improved significantly with the introduction of DirectX to Vulcan translator.

Wine is the traditional method of running Win32/Win64 binaries on Linux. For DirectX support for games they, have in the past, depended on a DirectX to OpenGL translator. However in the past few years a new 3D API called Vulcan has gained in popularity. Some enterprising hackers have wrote a DirectX to Vulcan translators that turned out to be much better then the older OpenGL translator.

Vulcan is much lower-level API then either DirectX or OpenGL and is intended to be universal and be used on everything from phones, to gaming consoles, to desktop computers. This way game engine designers can just target Vulcan and be supported everywhere instead of having to use different APIs for different platforms.

Valve, the owners of Steam, have picked up on it this and officially adopted Wine into the store. They call it 'Proton'.

Proton is officially supported for a number of previously windows-only games. However you can go into settings and enable it for unsupported games, if you are feeling adventurous. I've tried it several times on 'unsupported' games and it has worked for me for the most part. However I expect you can run into problems that use a lot of heavy ant-cheat software or games that are new releases.

Last week it was reported that over the course of a year, since Proton was officially introduced, the number of 'Proton' games have increased to 6000. I am guessing these 6000 games were previously unplayable on Linux. Out of those 1000 are 'Platinum rated', meaning no reported issues. Especially for AMD users... When it works it works well. It has turned out that for some games the Proton translation is faster then native DirectX on Windows, which is amazing.

It's not perfect, though. If you are a hard core gamer you probably will still have zero desire to use Linux and for good reasons. Drivers still are not perfect, anti-cheat kicks Linux users quite often, I've had issues were input gets screwed up when switching windows, and such things. But it's a hell of a lot better then it's ever been before and means that Linux is no longer the red-headed step child of gaming.

W10 is almost free, I have been fighting it somewhat and i dont like the ram it down your throat updates weather you want it or not crap-attitude. You can run W10 un activated for a long while, i have one box on it for a year now. I did buy two W10 keys on ebay for $5, both still working (MS not complaining). I still have W7 on most of my PC's and will continue to use it with updated AVG antivirus and malwarebytes.

I went back to W7 on my normal HDD's for the past week, and still have the fresh W10 on another HD.
Since going back to W7, I've been having problems downloading, cant dl anything. So I just went to a restore point 2 weeks back and it seems fine with a random Meanwell pdf download. Seems I have to revert to a restore point every 2 years. Funny thing was I could not go to Control Panel and delete anything, it would just hang up.

My plan is to install XUbuntu, find a W7 skin for it, and have W10 non-activated for steam games in a VM. I play basic games, like Super Mario style games from 15yrs ago kind of graphics. Super Meat Boy is a game I just played, but the old skool Sid Meirs Railroads games are what I'm playing now.