Because Shiny Things Are Fun - The New New Windows v Linux Thread
GeneralThis forum is for non-technical general discussion which can include both Linux and non-Linux topics. Have fun!
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
"One of the many nice things about Linux from the POV of us oldies is that it's easy to find out how it works."
What I've been finding, too, is that there are a lot of nice folks out there willing to share their knowledge of how it works! (One of the things I loved about the old days of DOS was that a reasonably intelligent layperson could figure out what the O/S was doing. It became much harder to do with Windows. I remember 3.1 and '95 users just going crazy when they had problems. That's why I stuck with DOS for so long. Also the software I used for my business back then was DOS-based--their developers apparently didn't think much of Windows either.)
Yes, yes. My business had some dos-based software too. Early windows versions didn't have plug and play, so if you driver couldn't find it component, all hell broke loose. And certain items hard wired themselves to one of the 16 interrupts. I had to trick my video into using irq 12 to let the nic have irq 11, because that wasn't budging!
But we were younger then, and it was a step up on loading programs from casette tape!
I have to say that I have only ONCE purchased a machine just to run Linux and that came with Linux: and that was a Pinebook Pro. All my other machines came with Windows or were designed for windows, and I converted them to Linux. The most recent by replacing the internal drive and preserving the old one so I could swap back if Windows were ever needed.
(I needed it ONCE: a firmware update for HP laptop hardware that they released ONLY for Windows.)
I know the post I'm replying to is old, but it may be useful to others.
If you don't want to waste a drive's capacity, you can try what I use:
Basically you're installing Windows to a USB flash drive. Slow, but serviceable for those rare occasions when needed.
Ignore the warnings on other MS pages about it not being available to newer versions. This procedure still works perfectly well with 11. All you need is a disc image and PowerShell (ignore any search results using specific programs - you don't need them!).
It has worked for me for Lenovo firmware updates, but YMMV.
For those of you who weren't aware - following the Windows 10 "free upgrade" offer of several years ago, the loop hole to upgrade Windows 7/8.1 to 10/11 has still existed ever since. It was merely a case of downloading an ISO image of Windows 10/11 via the "media creation tool", mounting it and running the setup.exe to upgrade the OS. Over the years I have done this countless times - Windows activates as normal and away you go.
It was also possible to use Windows 7/8.1 keys to activate Windows 10/11 clean installs (also done that stacks of times).
In both instances this was simply because Microsoft allowed Windows 7/8.1 keys to be used to activate Windows 10/11.
This has now ended. In my work I maintain a lot of Windows PCs we put out to clients (over 1000 boxes). Many of these are ageing, but they do their job and work well (we replace hard disks or CMOS batteries or get the electrolytic caps replaced in the power supplies, but that's about it - and out they go again).
As and when they are swapped out and repaired, I was upgrading a lot of the old 7 boxes to Windows 10 - this latest move by Microsoft has put an end to that. I actually hit this problem one afternoon and found three boxes with Windows 7 COAs which would not activate either after restoring from an image and changing product key, or after upgrade using the setup file or after a clean install. In all cases Windows refused to activate - because Microsoft switched it off.
(I'm now back to working on my contingency plan - a FreeBSD installation to replace Windows 7.)
Microsoft profits are down - so this move is an effort to drive sales of Windows 11 licenses, but it will also drive some people away toward alternatives - but who cares about them.
So if you have a Windows 7 or 8.1 installation you're thinking of upgrading any time soon - don't do it...
I got caught in a Catch-22, having had windows-8.0 foisted on me, which was awful. Then I had an 8.0-->8.1 online upgrade foisted on me. The update puked, and left me on windows-8.½, which was useless. I did the decent thing and promoted myself to 100% linux, and never looked back, except to recount the horror story.
The 8.0 -> 8.1 upgrade process was unnecessarily convoluted. You had to go to the MS store and it was just a huge ball ache - I also remember it breaking quite tragically and the usual workarounds of stopping the windows update services and deleting all the cached windows update files didn't help. I seem to recall just downloading the 8.1 ISO for any "8.0" installs and just clean installing - though thankfully didn't come across many 8's.
Last edited by _blackhole_; 11-01-2023 at 11:00 AM.
The 8.0 -> 8.1 upgrade process was unnecessarily convoluted. You had to go to the MS store and it was just a huge ball ache - I also remember it breaking quite tragically and the usual workarounds of stopping the windows update services and deleting all the cached windows update files didn't help. I seem to recall just downloading the 8.1 ISO for any "8.0" installs and just clean installing - though thankfully didn't come across many 8's.
M$ windows 8.0"offered" me an 8.1 update as a 'yes/yes' option, kind of. It tried to update from 8.0 and failed. I ended up slinging a spinning rust ultra-slow drive, buying an SSD, and installing on that. The ssd was so transformational I never went back.
The ssd was so transformational I never went back.
Yes, I've just discovered that. I had conniptions at the thought of having to change the drive, but I got a lot of helpful advice from people here and in the end it was easy. Getting my UEFI to boot the new drive was more difficult, but that was basically a software problem and I can cope with those.
The interesting thing is that the two programs which used to take ages to load (firefox and libreoffice) now load as fast as any other program. Seemingly it was the disk reads that were taking up the time.
The ssd was so transformational I never went back.
+100. At the time I switched over to an SSD, it really 'felt' like a new computer from boot time to using. Over time, the rest of my systems got SSDs as well as there is no going back! I 'think' my first SATA SSD was a 'small' 64GB or 128GB drive back then. Now 2TB is the minimum in my price point range of around $100. Made systems so much more 'snappy' when loading and saving. As for Windows, the last Windows (at home) I worked with was Win 7. I do have it still in a VM if ever needed to pull up. Linux for all, all for one . Never looked back there either.
Following Poettering's guidance, I created this bsod tool.
Quote:
in case you wonder what a VT is, it's this archaic textual display logic that the linux kernel uses to do early boot logging
Tragic.
Poettering, a Microsoft employee, guides a developer to create a Microsoft Windows "BSoD tool", on the Microsoft owned github platform, for the now pretty much Microsoft controlled init system which is used in ~ 90% of distributions and which more and more "free" software, is now closely tied to...
Time for some of you Linux users to wake up and smell the coffee. The MS bashing thread is getting more and more irrelevant as time goes on...
These people are busily reinventing the MS Windows square wheel, complete with flat tyres.
Last edited by _blackhole_; 12-05-2023 at 05:21 AM.
Did Dos have a decent display? Or CP/M? Or 1980s Unix? Why only give out about linux?
It was all a limitation of the 80x25 Monitors & terminals in use at the time. That's why X has Display Managers and Window managers. I remember a lot of guys venting that the display was lousy. But it turns out on the myopic PC there's little/nothing can be done about it.
No, that's (one of the reasons) why NT doesn't run "on DOS" anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by business_kid
Or 1980s Unix?
In fact, it did. Unix got a decent (graphical) display and a native window manager by 1985, six years before Linux was even started.
Linuxers, however, still prefer to emulate line writers. I bet there is a reason for that. I wonder what it is.
Last time I booted either of these relics, I distinctly remember seeing old school boot messages displayed in a tty, rather than a graphical splash screen.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.
. Never looked back there either.
