Linux

[Jagosaurus]

That's a good point... this is aging hardware & a laptop. I'd rather not be installing new HDDs of possible. Is it possible to boot from an external HDD? Assuming partition is my best bet?

Thanks.

[Ziggy]

You can make a bootable USB stick with Linux and boot into the OS from it. It wont run as good as if it was installed on a HDD, but it's enough to give you an idea of the OS. It's also a good thing to have for fixing Windows PCs that can't boot.

[opa]

You can make a bootable USB stick with Linux and boot into the OS from it. It wont run as good as if it was installed on a HDD, but it's enough to give you an idea of the OS. It's also a good thing to have for fixing Windows PCs that can't boot.

Pretty much my suggestion. Just play around with different OS's to see what you like.

It's actually not a bad idea to have some Linux sticks just laying around. I have an old 512mb USB stick with puppy linux on it that I've used several times to access data on Windows pc's that were screwed up.

[Jagosaurus]

Good suggestions. I honestly hadn't thought a out testing out different OS builds.

So I'll get Mint running on a fresh USB and report back. Haven't had a good nerdy project in a bit so looking forward to it.

[o.pwuaioc]

There are a bunch of lightweight distros if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-wei ... stribution

I came to recommend DSL, and didn't realize it's been gone since 08. Tempus fugit.

[opa]

So I do have a little more to add on the lightweight OS discussion.

I bought a cheap Gateway laptop from Walmart around a year ago. I just needed something that I could throw around and not worry about breaking an expensive pc on the go. It came with Windows 11 but it barely ran with the crappy specs. Today I (finally) installed Xubuntu and everything is running really snappy. I've always liked the Xfce environment. No frills and easy to use.

A really great distro for lower specs.

[opa]

So full support for Windows 10 is ending next year (October, I think). I use Win10 for my steam/gaming/whatever... going forward - I'm not sure!
What are y'all's plans for personal computing? I'm strongly considering building a decent Linux build for once and leaving my Win PC for emulation.

o.pwuaioc, can you weigh in? I think you've been using Linux a while?

[Ziggy]

Ugh, I'm trying not to think about it. I can't believe support for 10 is ending next year, when it was billed as their "last" OS. I'm holding out hope that they'll extend it at the last minute. Windows 11 is making it so that many perfectly good PCs are no longer usable. There's probably extended support that business can purchase.

For my main desktop, I currently have Windows 10. I suppose I could just upgrade it to 11, although I will want to read about privacy settings and whatnot first. The annoying part though is that Windows reports my PC doesn't meet the requirements for 11. But it does! I think it's because of a setting in the BIOS when Windows first checked, and now I can't seem to get it to recheck. Not a big deal if I do a clean install. But I really don't feel like doing a clean install. I think I'd rather just do an in place upgrade to 11. So I'd have to figure out that issue first.

For my secondary desktop, this is where it gets annoying. It's an older i7 rig that doesn't meet the requirements for 11. I know there's work arounds to force install 11, but I'm not sure I want to do that. I planned for this when I installed 10, and partitioned the SSD so that I have half left over for Linux. So what I may end up doing is dual-booting 10 and Linux. Although it might be annoying to have to restart my PC if I need to use a Windows app real fast. So I'm not yet sure what I'm gonna do here. The real annoying thing is that I sometimes like to use this PC for GoG and Steam games. Which, I'd have to keep it online for that. This was my old main desktop, so it's sort of like a free desktop here. I wouldn't want to spend the money on a new build just so I can get Windows 11.

For my laptop, I guess it's just really old at this point. I do have a SSD with 10 on it, and it definitely doesn't support 11. I have another SSD for it with Mint. Just for convenience, I would occasionally use it with 10. Or if I want to use a random Windows app that I don't totally trust, I'll use it there. I'll probably just keep my Win 10 SSD offline, and use it for sketchy apps if I must. But most of the time it'll just run Linux Mint going forward.

This reminds me, I have to check on my parent's desktop. It's something I built for them, but I have no idea if it supports 11 or not.

Mostly, the end of support for 10 is just a big inconvenience for me.


edit: Hmm, very annoying. On my main desktop, apparently the default BIOS settings didn't have the correct settings for Secure Boot. So when I installed Win 10 it did it in such a way as to not support Secure Boot. Now that I have the correct settings in the UEFI, Windows still detects that Secure Boot is not supported because of the way the OS was installed. You can convert your Windows install from legacy to UEFI using a built in tool. I'd be a little nervous to do it though, apparently it converts the MBR to GPT. So if it fucks up, then you're fucked!

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... 1405f800d7

another edit: I went through my purchase history on NewEgg, and my parent's computer that I built them definitely doesn't support Windows 11. Doesn't have secure book, TPM or a supported processor.

What do you guys think about circumventing the requirements? My only fear is that one day Microsoft will flip a switch and take away the ability to use 11 on such machines.

[opa]

I know there's some black-magic-trickery that lets you skip Windows 11 TPM checks, etc but - and please correct me if my info is out of date - you're not necessarily guaranteed security updates if you do that.

MS could very well do what you say at some point if enough people don't "upgrade" to their latest OS.

[emwearz]

I know there's some black-magic-trickery that lets you skip Windows 11 TPM checks, etc but - and please correct me if my info is out of date - you're not necessarily guaranteed security updates if you do that.

MS could very well do what you say at some point if enough people don't "upgrade" to their latest OS.

My Windows PC that I use at work at Win10, it is a Haswell CPU. Literally just created a iso in RUFUS from the official ISO to remove the checks. Easy.

If they remove update in the future, you are in the same situation you are in now and you can jump over to Linux?