Wait, wait, this isn't one of those articles wherein I proselytize the penguin, nor is it a fad or a phase - it's something I've been wanting to do for a long time now - practically since the first time I was introduced to Ubuntu Linux, when someone handed me a free copy through a car window at a traffic light back in the 1990s.
Yes. It didn't work very well then either.
But don't let my preconceived irritations and irks spoil things for you, let me regail you with my latest experiences in the land of the red fedora-wearing Penguin.
I've been messing about with alternative operating systems for quite some time. There's Linux, and then there were other weird and wonderful things that came up along the way, like BeOS, Lindows, Haiku and Raspberry PI OS just off the top of my head. As for Apple, let's not talk about that - if there's an OS and company worse on the scale of corporate grift, greed, invasiveness and control than Microsoft, I think that would be Apple. Yes, I know Microsoft is the bigger of the two - but they learned that strategy from the rotten fruit itself. Anyway, basically, I did all that research for fun, for self-enrichment and to learn alternative OSes to the ubiquitous Windows. It was only sometime later, when I saw how controlling, greedy and invasive Microsoft was becoming - somewhere around the Windows 7 era - that I started to consider a need to migrate to something else in the near future.
The question "but what TO???" has always lingered - and most frequently the answer has been "Linux". With so many voices chiming into the "Switch to Linux" chorus line a month ago with the "end of support" for Windows 10, I again started to ponder that question.
And it wouldn't be the first time. Back in the late 1980s, I started a small project with a school friend that we called Global Enterprises. We were both into programming at the time using Basic, and each of us had a Sinclair microcomputer of our own. He had a Spectrum, I had a QL. The QL was fancier and had a full proper keyboard, but aside from doing a little word processing and spreadsheets, was frankly quite useless. The Spectrum had a shitty rubber keypad, but could do so much more stuff, even fun stuff - and so was much more popular.
I find the comparison between these two somewhat reminiscent of the Linux-Windows debate - and you will likely see why later without me having to elaborate too much.
Anyway, so my friend and I planned to take over the world with our Basic programming skills, even creating windowed environments in laboriously typed-out program files. We joked about the popular new OS on the block called Windows 3.0 - and laughed uproariously about creating something similar and calling it "Doors". Doors 1.0 was never released. In fact, it never really got off the ground. And of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, neither of us ever got anywhere near becoming South Africa's answer to Bill Gates, or Microsoft.
That said, I come back to the topic of switching to Linux from Windows 10 or 11 and why I called it a "scam". People are telling their audiences to quit Windows for these reasons (and there are many, many valid and good reasons to do so) and to "just install Linux". Most of them point out how easy Linux is to use or get used to - but relatively few seem to take the trouble to point out that Linux, as less rare as it's become in the computing world - simply doesn't work for everyone.
In the midst of this, I've seen videos of community projects actually removing Windows installations from people's PC's and laptops and replacing it with recommended flavors of Penguin OS. It's in a good cause after all - Microsoft is evil! They've spying on us and selling our data - and advertising at us via our own PCs, and also restricting our personal digital freedoms etc. All true, of course. No argument from me there. But the problem I have with this is that there are millions of people now clamoring to leave Windows, all whipped into a paranoid frenzy by influencers and experts alike - while not really having anywhere better to move to.
Well, yes, Linux.
I'm sure there are going to be loads of miserable Windows apostates out there soon, wandering aimlessly around their Linux desktops, dazed and confused, as they circle the Gnu and sidestep to avoid tripping over the Gnome, while trying to work out where anything is and why so little works as advertised. I couldn't find anything Linux-related that would work for an "elephant in the room" - cut me a little slack, I'm workin' here.
But if there is an elephant in the room - neatly parked hogging the mat right at the center - it's that if windows users leaving Windows want anything, it's another, better, freer, less dystopian, less bloaty, and far less big-brothery kind of Windows - one that will actually run their same apps - and where the only change needed will be to replace the OS and not every single other thing they're accustomed to using.
I'd call that a real trumpet call.
Back to my own search for a suitable Linux candidate to replace Windows 10.
Last week, after a break of about a year, I experimented with Linux again. This time, by installing it to a spare older laptop just to see how it goes. Well, it went about as horribly as you might expect. How so? Because I installed and worked through a succession of new flavors (or distros) of Linux that had come out since last December, and still didn't find anything I could comfortably see myself migrating to as my new "home OS" on all my other machines. I started where I'd left off last year - with Linux Mint. Although there was a new version of Mint available, it hadn't changed in any way I could detect that would change my mind from last time. Bummer.
Then I installed two different flavors of Zorin, and was a little bit impressed. I enjoyed the windows-like experience. There, see? I'm not unfair, nor am I a Linux-phobe - I actually said something nice about Linux. Try not to faint! The wallpaper images were also very nice, high quality - but not even splashes of color in glorious HD could make the series of issues I encountered go away. Each of these rendered me feeling less amicable towards Linux distros this time around as well. For example, although I was able to sort out a few annoyances like the tendency for it to just auto-lock the screen with a password for no particular reason, or the quirky imitation Explorer app that refused to show me any folder trees at all - but let's just say that the manufacturer's promise that you won't have to use the terminal 'much' is just so much hot air.
Of course you have to use the terminal - it's fucking inevitable with Linux, and it's annoying. Yes, I use the command prompt and PowerShell in Windows too, but that's for superuser/high end purposes, not for simple tasks like just trying to get the damn thing to actually see my home network because there aren't any proper settings that use a visual reference and a fucking mouse in 2025! This is the future - we don't "terminal" here FFS!
How exactly do you install fonts in this nightmare? And how do you actually tell if something is running or not, because if you click on something, it flashes open and then simply vanishes. Why are there no useful "help" files either on the PC or on the internet? Is there even a task manager in this thing? These and other conundrums stood in an irate queue of things that needed to be sorted out, tapping their feet at me!
To make things more frustrating than they had to be, the Brave browser that came preinstalled with Zorin wouldn't allow text to copy-paste into the terminal either, so it was manual typing from visual references. Using strings of unfamiliar terms and special characters. Sudo fucking kill me now. LOL.
Anyway, let's just say that trying to test-run proper apps of convenience that I rely on, like Winamp and iPhoto Plus 4 was problematic. Yes, they do run - but unreliably, and the rigmarole in getting them to open at all using a jarring combination of WINE and Bottles (see what they did there - cute isn't it?) is migraine inducing. They also took a while to open, and not because I had to browse to the .exe file each time because the Linux version of the "shortcut" didn't do much shortcutting.
I installed these two Windows apps as a test, a prelude to working to get Office 2016 and Videopad to run in a "bottle" - of "Wine" or whatever, probably using Winboat later (since neither of the first two emulators seems fit for purpose). After hours of these simple Windows apps unreliably and erratically opening (and then not opening at all) it didn't look very encouraging at all.
The real deal-breaker with Zorin was that I wasn't able to get it to see other PC shares on my network. I never got round to trying Winboat (or is that "Winbloat"? Apparently there's a string of other parasitic apps that users need to install just to get THAT one to work!) because if the network didn't pick up, there was no point. I got to grips with the settings on Zorin, and I have to say it looks acceptable and possibly useful, and fairly pleasant to navigate. If I could only... just get it to do what I fucking needed it to do! Sadly not.
You see, I need to have the same apps available on Zorin as I do on Win 10. Not ersatz substitutes - THE actual apps. Some of the apps I use DO have Linux ports or exact versions made for Linux - like Winamp does (yes, I know) and VLC and OBS studio - but the rest have no substitutes. Even so, all of that was pretty moot because two different flavors of Zorin refused to access network shares on our Win 10 PCs. Nothing I tried, after watching way too many how-to Zorin videos and reading tutorials and applying all suggested fixes (yes, even using that fucking terminal) changed that. Alas, after battling with Zorin for two late evenings, I finally decided it was a good option to just 'fuck this' and move on to another distro.
It was AnduinOS's turn next - two whole different versions of it, each with a name that I couldn't decide was meant to be witty or clever, or just odd. Noble Numbat was the first, and the second was Questing Quokka. Cute. Not only was it simple and pretty to look at, but it detected my network right away. And there the good news ended. Yes, it saw the shares on the network alright - it just wouldn't let me access them! But wait, there's more - it got even worse! Although Anduin ran fine as a pre-install demo, it wouldn't finish installing to either of the drives in that laptop. Towards the end of the installation, it suffered fatal errors three times with both different versions I tried, even with the help of partitioning tools, changing BIOS settings and all. So that was it for AnduinOS.
Speaking of which... Am I the only person alive who thinks it's pretty damn sus that a guy currently working as a software engineer for Microsoft is sitting at the head of a supposedly competing Linux brand, luring Windows users away from Microsoft - and how he somehow not only hasn't been fired yet? How about how blatantly obvious it is, that AnduinOS is more than likely a 'plant' that actually belongs to Microsoft lock, stock and barrel? But wait, as I do so often, I digress!
Coming back to my search for viable Linux distros, I did have a look around for more new promising ones, but in vain. As for the two versions of Zorin and two versions of AnduinOS, if it won't meet my criteria (the least of which is to install on my old spare laptop!) I'm not willing to try it on another of my systems.
As far as I'm concerned, Linux is still a glib salesman's empty promise - with all the connotations that association implies. Yes, it looks very shiny, it can even game under the right conditions, and it can probably be useful - provided you only need what it is able to do, and no more than that. But - if you expect to find what you already have on other OSes, you're likely to be disappointed.
If I can think of one word to describe Linux, it would be "underfeatured". You can see it in the options, in the context menus, and also in every way it continues to try to compare itself with Windows.
So, to the people out there peddling that "switch to Linux now!" bicycle - keep on peddling. If I ever do make a switch to Linux, it's going to have to improve by leaps and bounds first.
I'm not hating on Linux - or on the people who make it. Far from it - they've done a brilliant job in getting it this far. I mean, it looks about as good as Windows does now, especially without all the ads, bloat and spyware. All they have to do now to seriously scare their competition, is make it do the same things Windows can do - and they still have quite a way to go on that part.
I'll try this exercise again maybe this time next year, with anything else that comes out in the meantime. Or maybe not. Seems I'm going to be sticking with Windows 10 for now - but on my own terms: Windows 10 (X-lite Optimum) with all the spyware and bloat removed, and all "updates" blocked permanently.
It just works. No drama.
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