There’s certainly a case to be made for saving Chromebooks from the landfill by installing Linux. There will be plenty of people who will be happy to have one. But that will be a different target audience than the people who use old ThinkPads.
To add to the software point, STOP buying hardware that requires some shitty software to fully work.
I did this back in the Windows 7 days years before I even knew anything about Linux. But Razers rootkit managed to load in before the Win7 login screen then crash it. After that I avoided any peripherals with mandatory software and it made my transition to Linux a lot easier than most people I know.
Seconded, why not OnlyOffice? (maybe parent commenter got names confused 🤷♂️ no judgement)
as for OpenOffice vs Libre Office— IIRC Libre has more recent development on it, which IMHO feels like a good sign for open source software; it’s kept more up to date
Is it people that want to switch away from Windows or switch to Linux?
In my case it was the former, having spent a lot of time on FreeBSD so in 2007 I bought a Macbook Pro running OSX 10.3. This gave me most of what I wanted and when I needed something Windows (XP) specific I installed a VM running under Parallels, then Virtual Box.
I was able to run most of the open source software at that time such as Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird in preference to the Apple supplied apps.
I class myself as having similar experience to your friend having used Power Basic and Turbo Pascal mainly under DOS. I was able to use tkinter to produce some simple gui front-ends to produce dialogue boxes, process data and feed it to GnuPlot.
Seriously, OP sounds like they taste tested a handful of open software options and wanted to share, but had to implicate the newbie decision of windows vs Linux somewhere.
Great write-up, but in my opinion this is exactly the wrong way around.
That way, you don’t gain anything from your “switch” up front.
Better to switch to Linux and keep the apps you know wherever possible. Office, Teams, Photoshop, Lightroom and many others are available as web apps now. For many others, there are versions ported to Linux or running well in Wine. Finally, Gnome Boxes makes it trivial to integrate a small 50GB Windows VM to run apps where there’s no other option.
Then you can slowly migrate to Linux-specific open source tools, in your own time.
It helps if you can get away from an app-centric view of computing to a result-centric view:
You don’t need MS Office, you want to create/edit documents, tables or presentations.
You don’t need Photoshop, you want to edit images.
You don’t need Outlook, you want to connect to Exchange.
Almost all tasks are possible to do on Linux if you change your workflow a bit. Some aren’t, especially when you’re forced to collaborate with others in a professional setting. In that case, you can still minimize your Windows usage to what’s necessary, by using Wine, web apps, dual-booting, using 2 devices, running a Windows VM inside Linux, or running a Linux VM inside Windows, depending on your needs.
I highly disagree with recommending regular users to use virtual machines, it defeats the whole purpose, at the end of the day, you are still using windows, and on top of that, it adds additional complexities that can only create frustration to users.
I get what you’re trying to say but I disagree with this. Software can be a barrier to switching OS but it very much depends on the individual user’s needs - it’s not as easy as substituting open source for closed, and is only part of the difference anyway. For example, I use Outlook at work; Thunderbird is great but it is in no way a substitute for Outlook. Similarly, I use Microsoft Office 365 at work; OnlyOffice is in no way a substitute for an individual user (it can be for a whole business or for personal use, but not if you’re tied in to an organisation or employer using Office). If you’re tied into those platforms with work, then for occasional use you can just use the online versions of Microsoft Office in Linux via a web browser. And if you need to work from home or do more, then realistically you need to have Windows and access to the full suite installed locally.
But software does not preclude switching to Linux; for example I dual boot between Windows and Linux on my home PC. I have an M.2 drive for Windows and another M.2 drive for Linux. I rarely use Windows at all now, but when I do it’s if for some reason I need to be doing work related stuff from home or rarely if I can’t get a game working in Linux. In Linux I can do all my web browsing, social media, video streaming, music listening, even gaming and I know I’m doing so privately and securely.
I’d say the best way to switch to Linux is to switch to Linux. New users do not have to be “all in” - they can dual boot between Linux and Windows (or MacOS and Linux), and then have a low level of risk to try out the OS. It can even be beneficial in itself as they can compartmentalise work and free time by OS. And if they don’t want to dual boot, then just try it out by virtualisation.
This is how switched, though I’d recommend properly platform agnostic software (Windows, Mac, and Linux support) since if you don’t find Linux proper works for your workflow, you could switch to a Mac.
Another thing which helped me was switching my Laptop first before my Desktop since if I had problems (which I did) I could loose my laptop and not worry about data loss.
As of now, I am 2 year with Linux on my laptop and 6 months on my desktop with no noticeable difference between my Windows experience and Linux.
I just dive head first and use Arch btw if games or softwares I play/use refused to run Linux I just stop playing/using it and find alternatives, I yet to find any softwares that doesn’t have open source alternative
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