I'm on 64 bit Windows since Vista SP1. Was faster than XP on the same hardware once the requirements were met. And then came Windows 7 and Vista only got the performance-kliller bodgefixes.

@Jou (Mxyzptlk)

"I'm on 64 bit Windows since Vista SP1. Was faster than XP on the same hardware"

If it was on the same hardware you must have been one of the few running the XP 64bit version. The issue with vista was how terrible it was internally. You could see that on any software package which advertised a minimum spec for any operating system (XP or 7) and a separate spec for double the memory on vista. Large copies were broken on vista too where (I think it was) 3gig files would effectively stall the copy and change from a few minutes to an insane length of time.

7 was a serious upgrade to vista and what the OS should have been.

On a similar note I installed Ubuntu on the aged out XP machine owned by one of my family members (32bit) and she got the speed boost and none of the vista problems she had with her much superior spec laptop. Eventually we upgraded the laptop to linux as well.

Windows XP 64 bit was not wide spread, the hardware support was too thin. I am more a gamer, so at home XP 64 bit did not make much sense. For Vista I simply doubled my RAM to 8 GB, and the rest was already fast enough. Result, for example: LAN copy speed ~100 MByte/s (thanks to SMB2 and otherTCP/IP improvements which came with Vista), whereas XP never got beyond 60 MB/s. For companies only a few I worked with used XP 64 bit for a few special tasks, the hardware was too expensive for normal stuff.

XP support is long gone.

Very many products don't support Win7 or 32 bit already/

The basics are there I thought, although the questions about knowledge of Linux were perhaps a little subjective.

Each stage of the quiz could do with some factual information though, a few sentences describing the way a Linux system does things might help. Also more detail on use cases: e.g. do you use an office package most days &c. Also some explanation of libre/proprietary licencing issues might help.

I agree that the final presentation of results is a little overwhelming. Perhaps a sort of spreadsheet table where each cell is a link to distros ranked for the particular criteria that the person rated as important?

Icon: It is a start, and has the considerable merit of actually existing.

"I agree that the final presentation of results is a little overwhelming"

Or underwhelming!

I got it to list several distros that it then couldn't recommend due to various criteria in my answers. If they couldn't be recommended, exclude them from the list. Then prune the answers to the top 3 or so.

They need to PICK ONE and recommend that one distro, whichever their Linux guys believe would be the easiest to install for someone with zero Linux knowledge.

Yeah all the distro warriors will be up in arms complaining that the reason there are so many is because everyone's needs are different blah blah blah, or mad because they think their pet distro is the one that should have been chosen. To that I say, SHUT UP!

It has been proven many times that choice is paralyzing for people - too much choice makes people want to avoid the choice at all - which in this context would mean continuing to use Windows 10. Even the author's recommendation of three choices is too much choice for people who will be predisposed to want to find a way to not make any choice at all. How does someone with no Linux experience properly decide?

No, just give them one. Maybe it isn't the "ideal" choice for their needs but being directed to the "wrong" distro isn't going to be what sinks or swims someone's potential attempt at ditching Windows. It will be the fact that they've been used to Windows for years, and what they're using won't be Windows. Even if some small fraction of people find that one distro unsuitable and would have liked another more and possibly stuck with Linux that number will be greatly outweighed by the people whose eyes glaze over when presented with too many choices about something they know nothing about and respond by making the choice not to try Linux at all.

I can see dropping 32-bit support. That's a significant effort to maintain.

However, Windows 7 is not that different, and the reason several folks I know use Windows 7 is a) they want to get off the MSFT treadmill which IS THE SAME REASON THEY'RE USING LibreOffice and b) they need Windows and not Linux

Personally I need a Windows 7 lappie because Yamaha Diagnostics Tools 3 is VERY picky about what it runs on. It will not install on Windows 10/11, for instance, and as far as I know, there's no v4 that does.

Is Windows 7 THAT different in the APIs??? I guess it must be, if YDT3 requires it that hard...

If you only need W7 for some specific application like that surely a small partition on a dual-boot laptop is enough.

The problem is newer versions of Windows constantly mess with the boot process, destroying your dual boot, and unless you know what you're doing, you're not going to get it back.

I just wouldn't use that laptop or PC for anything else - treat it as a dedicated, air-gapped box, never to be online again.

No, but there's a lot of badly written Windows code that in some ways fires in its own feet usually doing something silly. There's a lot of old software that runs flawlessly on Windows 11.

Raimond Chen blog is full of stories about Microsoft having to ensure badly written software by Fortune x00 companies still works regardless how silly were its developers.

Anyway having to interface with hardware may need specific drivers - the driver stack may evolve in ways that make older drivers no lomger working - especially if written "somehow" - and now Windows also flags and blocks a lot of drivers that have known security issues, since they can be used to attack the system.

There is a lot of old software that won't work on Win10 or Win11.

There is a lot of 32 bit widows SW that won't work of 64 bit Win7 or 10.

Does anyong care about Win8?

No. Nobody ever has or ever will. It's that OS that everyone, hopefully including Microsoft, is content to not think about. If something is supported under 7 and 10, then 8 should probably run it, and if it doesn't, too bad. If something is supported on only one of those, then 8 might run it, you find out. It has the benefit of being out of support too, meaning we have even more reason to not think about it.

UI changes meant that almost all businesses decided to skip Windows 8, and it only stuck around for a couple years before 10 replaced it, so it's also one of the versions that had the least market share. Another reason for that is that Vista was unsuccessful, so many people who were buying new hardware had bought it when Windows 7 was new, meaning they didn't need to replace their hardware for something with 8 included. Unlike with Windows 11, there wasn't as much time between 7's release and 8's, so there was less replacement due to attrition.

I've got a W7 laptop, also kept for "software reasons", which had no Office suite - so I've just downloaded LibreOffice for that purpose!

Incidentally, a lot of Core2Duo machines have 4 DIMM slots, so will go up to 8 GB with 2G sticks. I don't think I've ever seen a 4G DDR2 stick, and I expect it would be worth more than the rest of the PC put together to someone who really needed it.

I have a Core2Duo laptop sat at home with 8GB of DDR2, in 2 x 4GB SODIMM form. Looking on eBay they are definitely worth as much as the laptop is, though....

> Incidentally, a lot of Core2Duo machines have 4 DIMM slots, so will go up to 8 GB with 2G sticks.

Desktops, though.

I have a Core 2 Extreme, a quad-core, and yes, it maxes out at 8GB meaning it's still marginally useful... but not given the noise it makes, sadly.

Still, it was free, and I was very very grateful at the time. It made a fine Hackintosh.

But I have less use for a C2D desktop than I do for a C2D laptop, of which I have several, with lovely keyboards and lots of ports. One is even a convertible, and that's the DDR2 one.

*Very* few laptops have 4 *SO*-DIMM slots. I own a quad-core Thinkpad W520 which does, but it takes DDR3 and has 24GB in it already.

It isn't like your existing version of Libreoffice will quit working on that Windows 7 laptop. Why do you care if Libreoffice isn't upgraded to the latest and greatest version when you've already accepted having an OS that hasn't been updated for half a decade?

Besides, "end of support" just means they won't test on Windows 7 or fix bugs that are found to affect only Windows 7 but not later versions. You can probably still update, though probably the automatic updates in the app will stop functioning to avoid the chance they break people's working installs.

DistroChooser recommends all of the distros but none completely for me. So I still have to choose.

I'm a little surprised they didn't suggest installing LO on the existing W10 as a first step, just to show the sky doesn't fall in if you venture outside the Microsoft cage.

It's worth considering any distro's legal home base, too. I don't really trust US based distro's or any which derived from them.

Far too many security risks compared to organizations based in Europe in light of the recent political climate in the US.

.... even before it is declared dead and cold....

But again, people should switch to Linux and its softare because it fits their needs better, not because they have no choice....

Eh, "no choice" is as good as anything as far as I'm concerned.

As long as it gets people off Windoze, it's a good thing.

Accessibility.

Platform management; say what you like about MS, but device fleet administration is a whole lot more sorted out on Windows than anything else. There's a reason why corps by fleets of Windows machines.

Training.

Support, especially hardware support

Hello, Satya! That is, as everyone knows, utter bollocks, bullshit, and outright lies.

If fleet administration is a factor for you, you are almost certainly a business and not the target of this campaign.

Such as the Danish government's department for digital affairs. I am wondering if it's just coincidence that Libre Office's blog post came out 2 days after that Danish department announced their intention to deMSify themselves. There's no problem with that of course - well timed / coordinated publicity is good publicity.

Libre Office itself is perfectly capable. I use it. I even deploy it using Windows Group Policy (though their MSI's have been a bit broken in that regard of late). It even ticks the box for "not mucking around with the user interface too much and making user's life hard". The biggest challenge to its wider adoption isn't what Libre Office itself can do. It's that for those intent on running it on Linux in anything like a corporate environment for those users not thoroughly attuned to using and maintaining Linux (i.e. the majority), life can get hard, fast. And that if your org rolls Windows machines to solve those problems, MS Office is a very natural add-on.

In the Linux world, the app stack and OS are separately governed (and probably never talk). MS's advantage is that they're doing both the OS and the app stack. The difference shows up in adoption rates.

Having managed a fleet of around 4500 linux systems (VMs, Standalone HW, Clusters, gateways, dev/test/qa/prod, infrastructure storage etc) Umm, guess what mah frien? There be most excellent OPEN SOURCE solutions for fleet management that make that disaster from redmond look like utter crap.

And on how many of those 4,500 Linux systems are there users using Libre Office? And of those, how many are long-experienced Linux admin types and how many are your average non-IT corporate employee?

Just how many 32-bit-only machines are there out there?

I was a long term hold-out for 32 bit Linux.....and I adopted 64-bit Linux in 2016!! That was nine years ago!

Surely this LibreOffice announcement IS NOT NEWS!!

I've got one. Actually, I think I've got three, but haven't checked the laptops in ages so they may not work any longer. But there is definitely one 32-bit only box sitting on my LAN.

ACTUALLY, there is another case in favour of Win10 32 bit, aside from expensive (SO-)DIMMs:

Your machine's processor is able to do 64 bits, but one or more peripherals have only 32 bit drivers.

If any of these peripherals is critical, or very expensive, you are stuck with Win10 32. And since Win10 32 will be supported in one way or another until ~2032 * , it behooves "The Document Foundation" to keep emiting 32 bit builds, lest some competitor (¿OnlyOffice? ¿OpenOffice?) captures that market share

* Approximate support table:

Regular Win10: Oct 2025

Win10 + ESU for plebs like us (or Win10 IoT 2021 for corpos who use it): ~ Oct 2026

Win10 + ESU for corpos: Oct 2028

Win10 LTSC 2019: ~2030

Win10 IoT 2021: ~2032

LibreOffice has matured, prompting the project to change its version numbering system last year, as we explained in 2023. Like Ubuntu, the project now emits semiannual releases. The current version is LibreOffice 25.2, which as the name suggests launched in February.

Golly. Linux Mint has just upgraded me to 6.4.7.2 ...

v 24.2.7.2 on my LM 22.1

I've used LibreOffice for years and find Writer much, much easier to use than Word:

1) Tables don't keep deciding to join together if you want two tables that use the same style - only way to stop it, as documented on the MS site, is to insert an empty paragraph. Horrid practice when you\re trying to automatically flow content.

2) Space before and space after a table is a table property. Word requires it to be set on the paragraphs before and after the table. Again not good for layout, as the formatting ends up in the wrong place if the table is moved.

3) Rows split across a page break if columns in the row include "merge down" cells - the split happens in the cells that do not have the "merge down", even when "do not split row across page" is set.

I continually have to fight Word's instance to "extend selections" to "help" me select what it thinks I want to select - even with the settings configured for this not to happen. I selected what I selected because that's what I wanted selected...

Word used to be much better behaved that this, but the recent additions and "enhancements" to the automation just get in the way of someone who understands layout / editing.