Adventures With Windows 10

[wulf]

@Eadwine Rose. Yes, I can understand that. After years of using Photoshop I just cannot take to Gimp no matter how much I try. I find myself using Pinta which, although it's much more basic, does feel more comfortable and user friendly in it's layout, at least to me..

[djmclaws]

When I bought my wife a new ASUS laptop, which of course came with Windows 10 installed, It had mostly trial software that you then had to pay a subscription to continue to use after the first free period. At first I just installed LibreOffice on it and ignored the Office commercials. But later, her machine seemed to more aggressively push advertisements to buy this or that software. I got tired of it and just installed Mint on it. No dual boot. That was a couple of years ago, and she is completely happy with it.

I recently installed MX Linux on my laptop, and it runs noticeably cooler than with Mint. So now we have Mint on hers and MX on mine.

So I guess I live in a house with no Windows

[KBD]

If I had gone cold turkey I would have had a big problem as not all my hardware was compatible at the time, and given no moneeeeees to cover for it, yeah no choice in my case.

I dual boot with a separate harddrive that I can even slide right out of the system at a moment's notice if need be. Basically I use windows for Adobe products, and updating my TomTom :)

That makes sense. I think for me it would have been harder if I had just reinstalled Windows I might not have used Linux at all.
I have a Thinkpad with an extra drive stuck in place of the cd/dvd drive, have a hard drive caddy in there. Something like that would be great just to pop in a Windows drive on rare occasions if needed.

[Eadwine Rose]

https://www.jj-computer.com/artinfo.php ... %20%201086 <-- got me two of those. One holds the MX drive, the other the windows one. If a new MX comes out I simply slide one of them out, and slide another harddrive in there and install the release on that. When I am tired of it I simply swap things back :) Ideal!

[KBD]

https://www.jj-computer.com/artinfo.php ... %20%201086 <-- got me two of those. One holds the MX drive, the other the windows one. If a new MX comes out I simply slide one of them out, and slide another harddrive in there and install the release on that. When I am tired of it I simply swap things back :) Ideal!

That is nice. I imagine it is quite handy.

[Eadwine Rose]

Very much so. If I intend to do something and want to be SURE that nothing is connected that shouldn't be, I simply slide the drive out a bit. It IS hot swappable, but I always turn the system off when I do that, just to be sure.

[Stevo]

The newer MSI laptop I'm now using for package building supports updating the UEFI BIOS from a file on a USB stick directly from in the BIOS, so it doesn't require Windows at all for that. It also supports updating the EC firmware from a FreeDos Live USB.