Ive been using Windows since it originally appeared, remembering the old days of getting Windows running makes it seem to be much easier to move to Linux Lite than try to install the current Windows "updates" versions ... it would be so nice to return to the old days of using an operating system that just worked and wasn't selling all my data and installing messy updates everytime.

I've been using Mint (Cinnamon) for around a decade now and find it clean and simple to use, free of bloat. It just does what I need an OS to do, stay in the background and let me get on with stuff. I can't imagine ever going back to Windows, despite using it from the earliest versions and earning my living writing software for DOS then Windows machines.

And Mint, for now, runs just perfectly without flats as well. My Mint install is pure .deb, it works perfectly and I hope Lefèbvre will consider this for future releases. Otherwise there is still Debian. I * love* Cinnamon, not the the smell, just the DE. So Clement, why flats?

Mint MATE here

I've been using Debian, upstream for Ubuntu and therefore all their remixes, since whenever 2.0 was released. ('97-ish? Currently lacking the circular tuits to look it up.) I've only ever had to reinstall the whole OS for new hardware, upgrades Just Worked. What have they done to mess that up? Whatever it was, it goes all the way back to early Ubuntu and that should have been a warning flag.

Also, apt and snap|flatpack, take two packaging systems into the shower?! In which parallel universe does that make sense?

>> In which parallel universe does that make sense?

None. We already got .deb and Synaptic. *The Best.*

>> What have they done to mess that up? Whatever it was, it goes all the way back to early Ubuntu and that should have been a warning flag.

Nope. It was Debian's fault when they decided not to include proprietary drivers/binary blobs into the distro. It was a sinking ship and thankfully they realized it. But Debian still gives you Firefox ESR even on Sid. I mean, I run *beta* on my phone and my workstation and my laptop.

Paradoxically Ubuntu has tried to make things better by making them worse (snaps?!?). This is all on Debian. I wonder, are those guys living in some Jupiter moon or actually here on Earth in 2014???

Can you explain the connection between proprietary drivers and needing a complete system reinstall?

'Sides, if you're keen of the "Free as in Freedom" aspect then the proprietary stuff naturally gets excluded.

You don't see Chrome in many distros, but while it isn't FOSS, it is pretty much the industry default browser.

Years ago IE6 was the industry standard and look how that played out. Stagnant, forcing websites to conform to the MS way of doing things and so on.

Now I see they same thing happening again. My browser of choice is Palemoon, a perfectly fine modern browser that has a lot in common with Firefox but when I try and go to some sites I am greeted with a banner advising me to change my old, out of date browser and install Chrome. Being bloody minded, when I refuse their kind advice and stick to Palemoon the sites will either refuse to load, I'm looking at you GMX.com, or are so mangled that they are unusable.

I may be old and naive, but wasn't the idea that the internet was open to all, avoiding walled gardens and helping share with others?

One browser to rule them all is the pathway to internet hell and it doesn't have to be this way.

"Based on our own optimized layout and rendering engine, Goanna™"

Whilst I applaud anyone / any group brave enough to take on the creation of a new browser rendering engine, the task is enormous these days. I read somewhere that the browser is nearly like an operating in and of itself, what with so many apps working within them these days. Sounds like whilst some sites are just stupidly asking for Chrome because they don't recognise the user agent, it's also the rendering agent just not up to the task in some instances, rather than the website being broken.

I would like to try out a Linux desktop for my PC. I would be interested in suggestions for replacements for:

1. Microsoft Money (sunset edition of course). I tried Money Manager EX on Windows but it is missing some functions that I need. I suspect other Linux based ones may have similar issues, but I have not looked lately.

2. Adobe Lightroom (pre-subscription version) for its non-destructive editing of RAW image and nice cataloguing.

Would be good to hear if there are some good alternatives for these? Ideally would want to be able to import from Money and Lightroom into whatever the alternative is.

1. I can't comment from personal experience, but [1]others can.

2. [2]Darktable is very good for cataloguing and editing images. Expect some relearning of course. It is its own thing rather than an imitation of Lightroom. There is a Windows version, so you can try it out in advance of switching OS.

Good luck.

[1] https://www.fosslinux.com/46034/best-accounting-software-linux.htm

[2] https://www.darktable.org/

Importing [1]Lightroom sidecar files is a thing, BTW.

[1] https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/overview/sidecar-files/sidecar-import/

I run lightroom in an XP VirtualBox VM, and it works just fine. Just a data point. I do this for the Windows apps I can't live without and which won't run under WINE (soe will, just fine, some have isses)

Wow! I'm not the only person in the world still running MS Money!

I think the solution it to just virtualise your PC and run a VM for Money and Lightroom.

That said, I'm happy on W11 for now.

I got my other half off Microsoft Money after more than a decade using it by mentioning HomeBank (freely downloadable from homebank.org). Runs on Windows as well as on Linux, incidentally. Very much still developed and not proprietary, though, which is good.

For Lightroom, someone's already mentioned DarkTable, but RawTherapee is also good (and again runs on Windows as well as Linux). Digikam is also very good for image cataloguing, metadata management and so on. Digikam also has raw capability built in, so might be a suitable one-stop shop replacement for Lightroom all on its own.

Sounds like a nice distro otherwise. I've always been fond of XFCE.

Here at Linux Mansions Quicken has been running on Linux for about ten years.

......snags: it's a CD-based Windows release from 2006

......and: you need WINE on Linux.....but it installs and works fine with no probs.....

......which makes me wonder......maybe M$ Money would work fine with Linux/WINE?

> ....maybe M$ Money would work fine with Linux/WINE?

A cursory glance at some forums suggests it won't. Ditto Lightroom - some folk have working under Playonlinux, but they report deal-braking performance issues.

That said, it might be worth you digging deeper because these discussions were a few years old. I don't know if the advances over the last few years in running Windows games on Linux might be applicable to other applications.

Linux Lite may have idiosyncracies which irk experienced Penguinistas - but I find it doesn't trouble transitioning noobs at all.

It is my go-to Distro for dropping on ageing PC's/ Laptops with perhaps 15 minutes of user 'training' - which is more orientation than tech.

I have had no technical callbacks from new users at all (not even printer related!) I have trialled a few of the other, usual Distros in the past for novices (the Yankee term escapes me, what is it now? 'Learningers' or something probably) but Linux Lite hit the sweet spot for transitioning Windows users straight out the gate.

At worst, enquiries are of the "Where do I find" variety, but no-one has said "Get this junk off my machine, I hate it!"

I have transitioned 'power users' who were seeking a more *cough "feature rich environment" to eg: Mint, after they've first used Linux Lite, but I'd hesitate to make such heavyweight Distros my first choice. I feel LL is an ideal introductory environment.

It's not quite as light as it possibly could be, but it is nowhere near as resource heavy as others.

The last 'drop' I did was on an old Toshiba Satellite With AMD E-450's and 6gb Ram - it has happily ticked along on that, and reportedly only creaks a bit on multi-tab embedded media website browsing, but it apparently handles video conferencing very well - which surprised me

I'll be interested in how this new version rolls.

I like the thinking here.

From far too many years of experience I can say that most people could get away with little more that Notepad, Calc and a browser. Next step up would be the secretary/clerk types who need a basic word processor and spreadsheet (no, definitely NOT the macro stuff) and beyond that you get people with specific needs. Tailoring your offered Linux to that is a very sensible move and Linux Lite does seem to fit the role when you just need to make Notes and do big sums. OK I know I am denigrating it there but it really fits well as a starter kit and once they have been shown how life can be without Windows they are in a better position to decide if they need anything more complex.

I'll put my hand up as being one of those people developing an interst in moving to Linux. My computer runs fine on Windows 10, can handle everything I chuck at it. So when Microsoft unilaterally decide to stop giving me Support upgrades, then I'll be moving to Linux (since I am not upgrading my computer with a new motherboard and chip just to have some stupid extra chip which I dont even need).

However, I'm not going to lie, everytime I start reading one of these articles, my eyes begin to glaze over, flatpak, gnome, distros, zzzzzzzzzz.... Eventually, I'm going to have to try to pay attention, pick a package and give it a go... But boy do you Penguinistas not make this easy... ;)

I'd suggest giving Linux a try before MS stops supporting your version of Windows. Many Linux distributions have a live USB version that you can try without altering anything on your machine. Even better, get a cheap second-hand laptop from eBay (older machines can be picked up for as little as £30) so you can actually install and experiment with any distributions you fancy without risking losing anything.

Or, if you have space on your computer, try installing one of the options under VirtualBox. There are a number of options recommended for people in your position - Mint, Zorin, Lite ... Liam has covered all of them in various articles.

You'll have seen references to Red Hat, Suse and others which are enterprise versions and you can safely ignore them. Many are primarily intended to run servers even if they can be desktopped.

Welcome to the [1]paradox of choice.

OTOH would you prefer just one size that fits nobody very well?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Start with Mint. Pretty straightforward. Aesthetically pleasing. Forget about snaps or flats or debs and all the other crap we argue about. Just give it a try (and be amazed by how all your hardware, printers/scanners included, just work *immediately*!).

If I'm wrong shame me publicly here on El Reg! ;)

USB + ISO + Ventoy

Try any distro you want! :)

Including printers/scanners that have been abandoned by their creators.

...and by Windows.

I was going to say the same thing. Personally I'm not interested in flatpaks, systemd and stuff that passionate Linux users go on about. Mint just works, no need to get bogged down in details if you don't want to.

"However, I'm not going to lie, everytime I start reading one of these articles, my eyes begin to glaze over, flatpak, gnome, distros, zzzzzzzzzz.... Eventually, I'm going to have to try to pay attention, pick a package and give it a go... But boy do you Penguinistas not make this easy... ;)"

Same here. I was a regular Linux user over 15 years ago. Whilst I forgot most of it, I'm still happy in a command line rather than a GUI so was eager to go back to Linux for some time my while laptop running win 10 was grinding to a halt.

I'd recommend Linux mint and just ignore any mention of distros, flatpack etc. The official instructions from the main download page were easy enough, even how to create a new partition and have windows/Linux dual boot. Flatpak is over complicated, to the user its just a version of an application manager that some software uses and some doesn't. It just works.

Only decision I had to make when installing was which version of the desktop to choose, between three versions depending on how powerful your computer is. I went for the middle option on my 7 year old laptop that wasn't top end even then, it works fine. Also, the mint online forum is pretty good. Just ignore the jerks on there who won't say anything helpful until you've posted a full description of your system and taken their criticism at you for running some random bit of software that isn't the latest version, and you'll be fine.

Xfce. Oh dear. Yes lightweight, but horrible looking and some odd UI quirks. Not a great migration option from MS Windows.

Mate, Cinnamon and Budgie are so much better. Can these be installed easily?

"The office suite is LibreOffice, but surprisingly, the stable version 7.6, not the newer version 24.2 found in upstream Ubuntu."

I'd have thought that word "stable" makes it unsurprising.

"There are more Microsoft-like Linux productivity suites with a Ribbon UI."

There are also Windows versions of them. Even friends who use Windows are using these rather than pay for Office.

"There are some unwelcome GNOME accessories with their weird CSD button-bar, such as the Evince document viewer."

Perhaps KDE would really be a better choice of dektop for an emigrant from Windows distro.

KDE would be better. Windows 10/11 user is going to think they were transported back to the early aughts with XFCE.

I think you've really got this backward. You're thinking people coming from Windows 10/11 are going to find XFCE appealing? People coming from Windows are generally going to want all the bells and whistles -- they aren't going to be satisfied with a bare-bones distro.