My notebook still uses XP, I really need to change to a new OS but I don’t think its not powerful enough to take windows7. Are there other good alternatives besides Linux?
LINUX
Bad timing on my edit 
There isn’t one!
Now do you see why the years decades of support for Windows is bad?
Yeah…
Realistic answer @“The Furious One” FreeBSD, OSX (yeah, the Apple OS. It’s good. But you don’t get support unless you have one of their machines), Some Unix blend (AIX is my favorite, but it’s corporate shit, not for home use), and Linux.
In the end, your PC is a collection of programs that YOU control in order to read, write, watch and or gain entertainment. WHY should such an experience be tied down to only one platform? There is no reason other than “we want your money.”
The entire idea behind a large network of computers is that you can get information from any node within the system. Windows and The Internet as it stands today is counter intuitive to that premise that the fore-fathers set computers, computing and computer users at large out on waaaay back in the day.
A great way to take back those days is to get control over your PC once again and run Linux. Or, run your OWN OS! and fuck everyone!! !
I urge you all to think about where your computing cycles originate from, what they are being used for, and where they end up in the long run.
Linux sucks if you have AMD products. Their drivers and products are ass
Then go nVidia. FWIW, AMD is making huge strides and the OSS drivers are performing decently.
The most realistic alternative to Windows is Linux. FreeBSD is like Linux, but has the drawback that FreeBSD ports of OSS software isn’t as up to date and needs to wait for ported versions (if they even exist, though most of them do) and hardware support isn’t as good. To run Linux software you need a compatibility layer, which means pulling in Linux versions of software on top of FreeBSD so you might as well move to Linux at that point and just run native. Most OSS targets Linux first and foremost.
You can find a Linux spin for just about any hardware configuration or architecture. There are so many different distros that you should be able to find a flavor to your liking. Want your hand held? Then pick Ubuntu. Want stable with high compatibility and tons of software options? Pick Debian. Want something bleeding edge? Pick Arch. Want something tailored to your system, built for your PC and set up by YOU to run as YOU want it? Pick Gentoo/Funtoo.
Gentoo/Funtoo is, IMO, hands down the best OS you can choose. It’s tough as fuck to get used to at first, but once you level up and figure it out, you have a highly custom and tailored OS that performs extremely well. You get access to a lot of bleeding edge versions of software if you want or you could stick to stable versions if you need your system up 100% of the time. Unstable will be up for like, 99% of the time, so the risk / reward is fairly good for going unstable. All software is custom tailored to the settings you create as you install your OS, and will run for your machine.
Windows is good for one thing. Access to the world’s largest software library. That’s about it. If you don’t game, then there is no reason to run Windows. If all you do is browse the net and use your PC as a media box, then Linux is easily the best choice. If you do game, then having a Linux setup on one disk and a Windows setup on another and dual booting via bios (rather than setting up a bootloader, Windows loves to find ways to fuck your Linux bootloaders over) is probably the best way to go.
Linux still has a long way to go for some things. Complicated and poorly documented infrastructures like ALSA (fuck dude, it’s just beyond stupid complicated) makes Linux a mess at times, but usually after some hard work and research, once you set it up, you can pretty much forget about it and make a backup in case you ever need to reinstall. Outside of ALSA though, and avoiding shit like PulseAudio or OSS, setting up Linux isn’t all that bad. Text edit a config file or two and you’re good to go for the next few years. Linux does some things so right though. Getting used to using repositories for software instead of homepages like in Windows takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, you really look at Windows like WTF dude. Having software get updated and pushed to repositories saves the user time from ever having to go to a homepage and download and install a new version. It’s so much more streamlined.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/07/30/1358226/on-linux-550-radeon-r9-fury-competes-with-200350-nvidia-gpus <-- $500 AMD card works about the same as $200 NVidia card on Linux
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Company-of-Heroes-2-Linux <-- Company of Heroes coming out next week for Linux, without AMD support
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/08/18/1859259/amd-still-struggling-with-linux-gaming <-- Link is self explanatory
AMD is getting shit all over, on Linux.
I wrote they’re getting better, and performing decent. Not amazing, not fantastic, not great, decent. AMD is rolling out a new version of their GPU drivers and going forward, and will have a new format. They will get better over the next year or two.
nVidia sorely needs the competition. There is still much lacking from their end when it comes to Linux. No stereoscopic, no wayland, and so on. They need the kick in the pants to get better. Obviously, I think they’re good and no doubt the best on Linux, but a competitive AMD would go a long way.
Dude, I’ve owned ATI for longer than I can remember. All-In-Wonder card was the greatest thing I had ever put in a PC. But ever since AMD took over, I’m just not a fan anymore.
Went with an intel processor, and loving it, and probably going Nvidia next.
Linux and AMD combined to ruin Linux for me.
I have an AMD processor that is pretty good on Linux. I still have a nVidia card though, and plan to get another. nVidia has never done me wrong when it comes to graphics cards. I went AMD this time because it was a lot of performance for pretty cheap.
I used windows exclusively until 2009. I think I used Win 98, Win ME then Win XP. Surprisingly, Win ME was not bad at all on my PC. It wasn’t great but it ran just fine. Win XP was also fine.
Every 1.5 years or so, some catastrophe would befall my Windows PC. And the same thing would happen to my immediate family except every 3 months or so. I got tired of reinstalling Windows and gave Ubuntu a try. It worked fine on my PC, so I installed the same on my family’s other laptops. The rest of my family uses Chrome 99% of the time anyway, and the remaining 1% of the time they just need light document editing which LibreOffice can already handle. Nowadays I have Ubuntu on my personal laptop that I use for 99% of my computing needs. I have a Windows laptop given to me by my workplace, which I use only to play Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering Online. Also my Steam account, which currently has only one game (Skullgirls).
At work I regularly use Windows 7, 8.1, Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, Red Hat and several embedded environments.
Shopping for a new laptop for my wife and seeing all the “Free Windows 10 Upgrade!” star bubbles. [smh]
I have used Linux/ubuntu, OSX, and Windows(since the 386 days, I still fondly remember MS-DOS for games and some software). I don’t mind the Mac OSX, but I definitely think it gets way too much credit. I would much rather run a linux system than a Mac system, but I only have an extra PC that I play around with Linux on, I find the lack of software support too big of a negative to use it as my main PC. I haven’t tried having a dual boot system, I don’t know I would get much utility out of such a system. The other issue is that my work software only runs on Windows/Mac so I really can’t do a whole lot with Linux besides tinker with it here and there. My biggest gripe with Windows more has to do with how bloated office became and how slow it ran. I should not have a loading screen to save a .Doc file, that’s ridiculous on an i7 quad core with 16 gb of ram. Since I have to use win office compatible platform I switched to Softmaker office because it basically operates like Office XP but can save in modern Windows file formats. I put windows 10 on my wife’s pc then installed classicshell in windows 7 mode which has made Win 10 really close to win 7 and better in some ways. It at least got rid of the stupid metro/app store which I have no use for. Windows 8 fucking sucked, I have nothing good to say about that terrible OS. I’d rather use Win ME than Windows 8.
So I can do some things with different operating systems, but I am not a high level user who can program his own drivers or anything like that.
I should dual boot my PC and see what kind of games I can get to run on linux.
Add that to the growing list of shit I want to do but put off…
@J-ride Have you tried LibraOffice? It’s a pretty good OSS office suite. Your work software might run under WINE in Linux, could try that. I use Linux daily for just about everything, except modern games. Stuff like Dark Souls 2 I boot into Windows 7 to play.
@Exodus. If you dual boot, I suggest putting Windows and Linux on completely separate drives. If you try to write a boot loader to a drive with both OS on it, Windows will not play nice and try to override it, especially if your system is UEFI. I do this, and when I want to dual boot into Windows, I simply hit F8 when my PC boots. Then I select the boot drive I want. Otherwise, my PC defaults to Linux.
Games on Linux? Well, I think I have about 130+ games on Steam that have Linux versions. To be fair, most of those are indy titles, but some of them aren’t like Shadow Warrior reboot or Dead Island. The other 150 games I have on Steam are Windows only. Some of those run perfectly fine under WINE, which is getting better as it continues development. Not quite native performance, but it’s pretty good if you’re lazy and don’t want to boot into Windows to play a game quick.
Emulation is also really good on Linux. Most of the really good ones are developed by Linux users like Higan (bsnes) or puNES.
Been a linux mint user since about 2009, never went back to windows aside from my music stuff (mint cant run fl studio, and fl studio runs my electronic drum kit)
Linux
Latest release: 4.2 (August 30, 2015; 13 days ago)
Apple’s OSX
Latest release: 10.10.5 (Build 14F27) (August 13, 2015; 30 days ago)
Microsoft Windows
Latest release: Windows 10 (v10.0.10240) (July 29, 2015; 45 days ago)
…so I tried installing Ubuntu on my notebook. It was okay till I started installing stuff then it started crawling so I tried to install Lubuntu since that is considered the lightest version. Long story short… my notebook is bricked. ;_;