I love my Win10 installation

[yuanyasmine]

I love my Win10 installation, no problems and its faster and more secure.

[yui]

are you working for microsoft? or never used anything else? nowadays yeah it is kinda more secure than 7 but it still is not secure in the slightest and it is so much slower than 7 that it itself much slower than alternatives. to be fair i do not use aero on 7 but i can't disable metro on 10 nor can i disable cortana or the telemetry using up to 50% of the cpu on some machines. sure on a threadripper or epyc it will be faster as 7 can't use all the cores but otherwise i do not expect it to be ever actually faster, faster feeling maybe as it never shuts down the pc fully to make you believe it starts up fast and it caches in ram more aggressively.

[jamster]

I love my Win10 installation, no problems and its faster and more secure.

It sure is great, if you don't want any real control over your computer at all (forced updates which can break things, telemetry which can't be switched off totally, 'features' like Edge which push themselves down without authorisation).

Don't even get me started on what a pile of poorly documented garbage things like ReFS and Storage Pools are. I can't believe they are supposed to be business level products.

And I say this as someone who spent the first part of his career running enterprise Windows environments.

All this crap that Microsoft is doing with their subscription approach now means that I have a load of Linux instances running at home.

Edit: it's definitely more stable and convenient for the typical end user experience though.  You don't have to reboot it multiple times a week.

[Coreda]

Leslieann

> I love my Win10           installation

> I prefer using W8.1

[ddrfraser1]

Imo, XP was the best version. There are a few things windows 10 does well here and there but the UI is worse. They keep getting rig of useful features so that I have to hack my own computer to make it be able to do what it could in 1995.

[yui]

Edit: it's definitely more stable and convenient for the typical end user experience though.  You don't have to reboot it multiple times a week.

you have to reboot your linux? i have not done so since i changed the ram in the machine, windows ends up self rebooting but not my linux machines. although i use Debian for most machines, but even the opensuse one is running without proper reboot for a while. i had to move it so it was shut down but it was the 1st time since building it so 4 months.
and like you i have to work with windows and the bugs in it and office that are known since the dawn of time are numerous. i do not understand why companies are willing to pay that much money for a software that does not actually really work.

Imo, XP was the best version. There are a few things windows 10 does well here and there but the UI is worse. They keep getting rig of useful features so that I have to hack my own computer to make it be able to do what it could in 1995.

i liked 2000 better, found that everything was easier to get to, but then i was 5 so maybe not that great and i crashed it quite a lot.

[fohat.digs]

XP was the best version.
 

I am inclined to agree. After a few service fixes 98 was great, and I was also very happy in 7 for many years.

[jamster]

Edit: it's definitely more stable and convenient for the typical end user experience though.  You don't have to reboot it multiple times a week.

you have to reboot your linux? i have not done so since i changed the ram in the machine, windows ends up self rebooting but not my linux machines. although i use Debian for most machines, but even the opensuse one is running without proper reboot for a while. i had to move it so it was shut down but it was the 1st time since building it so 4 months.
and like you i have to work with windows and the bugs in it and office that are known since the dawn of time are numerous. i do not understand why companies are willing to pay that much money for a software that does not actually really work.

Imo, XP was the best version. There are a few things windows 10 does well here and there but the UI is worse. They keep getting rig of useful features so that I have to hack my own computer to make it be able to do what it could in 1995.

i liked 2000 better, found that everything was easier to get to, but then i was 5 so maybe not that great and i crashed it quite a lot.

You had to reboot older versions of windows on a fairly regular basis.

[Leslieann]

Leslieann

You have this backwards (I don't hate win8, it's just dead and Win7 is on the way), at any rate, there's a whole huge thread with my thoughts on Win10, this one is too easy.

you have to reboot your linux? i have not done so since i changed the ram in the machine

You should in order to properly update the kernel.

[yui]

well i know it is bad but you can reload the kernel without rebooting, when running a server board it is much faster (to be clear i am talking about my personal rig, i would not do that on a real server)

[Sintpinty]

I found the installation really painful. All the popups .... constantly clicking no...

[tp4tissue]

I found the installation really painful. All the popups .... constantly clicking no...

Kekeke.. it's alot easier than the XP days.   Then try installing Dos on old systems, drivers by commandline.   And you gotta phone in to that ONE guy on the usenet who got it working on that specific hardware,  and it turns out he's some sort of hardened criminal and now you fear for your life because you guys agreed to meet afk to talk about soundblaster.

[funkmon]

I found the installation really painful. All the popups .... constantly clicking no...

Kekeke.. it's alot easier than the XP days.   Then try installing Dos on old systems, drivers by commandline.   And you gotta phone in to that ONE guy on the usenet who got it working on that specific hardware,  and it turns out he's some sort of hardened criminal and now you fear for your life because you guys agreed to meet afk to talk about soundblaster.

Man I'm really glad that I was to young to do computer stuff at home before Windows 3.0. All the DOS was in easy mode by that time.

[Sintpinty]

I found the installation really painful. All the popups .... constantly clicking no...

Kekeke.. it's alot easier than the XP days.   Then try installing Dos on old systems, drivers by commandline.   And you gotta phone in to that ONE guy on the usenet who got it working on that specific hardware,  and it turns out he's some sort of hardened criminal and now you fear for your life because you guys agreed to meet afk to talk about soundblaster.

Man I'm really glad that I was to young to do computer stuff at home before Windows 3.0. All the DOS was in easy mode by that time.

I mean, getting all of your info from the internet has a cost

[LASERman]

I love my Win10 installation, no problems and its faster and more secure.

Nice troll attempt  Especially this statement: "more secure"
I want to know the assessment proces that leads to this conclusion.  )

[Z41N]

I'd like to get into Linux but I feel I'm not worthy hm

[fohat.digs]

Linux Mint Cinnamon is comfortable and comprehensible for a Windows user.

[Leslieann]

I'd like to get into Linux but I feel I'm not worthy hm

Read this, it might help get you started and help decide if it's even right for you.

[yui]

I'd like to get into Linux but I feel I'm not worthy hm

everyone is worthy, just need to find your home, for me it is OpenSuse with KDE other would rather use Ubuntu or Mint, i agree not everyone is open to help new comers but just ignore peoples trying to bring you down, linux has become much easier over the years.

[Maledicted]

are you working for microsoft? or never used anything else? nowadays yeah it is kinda more secure than 7 but it still is not secure in the slightest and it is so much slower than 7 that it itself much slower than alternatives. to be fair i do not use aero on 7 but i can't disable metro on 10 nor can i disable cortana or the telemetry using up to 50% of the cpu on some machines. sure on a threadripper or epyc it will be faster as 7 can't use all the cores but otherwise i do not expect it to be ever actually faster, faster feeling maybe as it never shuts down the pc fully to make you believe it starts up fast and it caches in ram more aggressively.

Windows 10 runs great on almost anything. I was surprised by how well it runs on Baytrail Atoms with just 2GB of RAM. The same was the case with 8, just the interface was much worse. I wouldn't even want to try to run Windows 7 on that hardware, regardless of aero. Cortana being enabled is what eats the most pointless system resources in my experience, shutting her off means smooth sailing on most systems made in the last 10 years ... or more.

Linux the king of speed/efficiency though, of course.

XP was the best version.
 

I am inclined to agree. After a few service fixes 98 was great, and I was also very happy in 7 for many years.

Yes, XP is king of Windows. Organization was perfect, better than any other operating system I have used, and performance was good too ... if you could look past/deal with its quirks. I wish M$ would have chosen it as their, "last operating system". But then again, if they had, they would probably be constantly making it worse with pointless "feature" updates.

[funkmon]

are you working for microsoft? or never used anything else? nowadays yeah it is kinda more secure than 7 but it still is not secure in the slightest and it is so much slower than 7 that it itself much slower than alternatives. to be fair i do not use aero on 7 but i can't disable metro on 10 nor can i disable cortana or the telemetry using up to 50% of the cpu on some machines. sure on a threadripper or epyc it will be faster as 7 can't use all the cores but otherwise i do not expect it to be ever actually faster, faster feeling maybe as it never shuts down the pc fully to make you believe it starts up fast and it caches in ram more aggressively.

Windows 10 runs great on almost anything. I was surprised by how well it runs on Baytrail Atoms with just 2GB of RAM. The same was the case with 8, just the interface was much worse. I wouldn't even want to try to run Windows 7 on that hardware, regardless of aero. Cortana being enabled is what eats the most pointless system resources in my experience, shutting her off means smooth sailing on most systems made in the last 10 years ... or more.

Linux the king of speed/efficiency though, of course.

XP was the best version.
 

I am inclined to agree. After a few service fixes 98 was great, and I was also very happy in 7 for many years.

Yes, XP is king of Windows. Organization was perfect, better than any other operating system I have used, and performance was good too ... if you could look past/deal with its quirks. I wish M$ would have chosen it as their, "last operating system". But then again, if they had, they would probably be constantly making it worse with pointless "feature" updates.

I'm still not getting quite the performance I want out of a Linux distro, though, on my, admittedly overkill computer.

3950x with 64 gigs of RAM and like a hundred hard drives. It doesn't seem like Linux scales as well to that kind of multi-core usage in the software I use.

[Leslieann]

Windows 10 runs great on almost anything.
I wouldn't even want to try to run Windows 7 on that hardware, regardless of aero. Cortana being enabled is what eats the most pointless system resources in my experience, shutting her off means smooth sailing on most systems made in the last 10 years ... or more.

Linux the king of speed/efficiency though, of course.

Win7 runs just fine on them, the problem being you need to deal with SSD trim, drivers and GPT formatting, not to mentiond getting it installed to begin with as Intel has blocked anything but 10 on them. 7 was designed to run on 256megs of ram and scales quite well.

Linux isn't always king.
I did a bunch of testing on this a while back. 10 would install and boot with only 512megs ram, it didn't run well but it would actually run. Ubuntu and quite a few others wouldn't install with less than 1 gig and when I got around that they had a ton of errors when you tried doing anything. However, once you did have a gig, Linux did run better. Though to be fair, Win10 did admirable considering, so long as you didn't install Chrome or need to update.

Yes, there are distros designed for low resources but they aren't mainstream like Ubuntu, and it wasn't really Ubuntu's problem it's a desktop environment problem. Good luck convincing the average Win10 user to switch to a stripped down barebones XFCE or I3 interface if they don't have to, some people like that, but Windows users are used to eye candy.

[Leslieann]

I'm still not getting quite the performance I want out of a Linux distro, though, on my, admittedly overkill computer.

3950x with 64 gigs of RAM and like a hundred hard drives. It doesn't seem like Linux scales as well to that kind of multi-core usage in the software I use.

Software is optimized for certain hardware.

You can't optimize something to run well on 1gig ram and also on 128gigs of ram, the code to allow it to scale the cache would be too prohibitive (and in the case of Windows not always possible based on the OS bit count) and for what purpose? Very few people have that much ram, in fact very few have desktops with even 32gigs ram, so why code for 64gigs or even more? The same goes for cores, cores are even harder to optimize for (a LOT harder actually) because certain operations (like video editing) have to remain in sequence, you can't have core 4 finish it's crunch and before 3 and put in line wrong.

The big core count performance jumps actually peaked at dual core, everything from there has been diminishing returns with 32cores being about the point where there is zero net benefit to adding more except in instances of many more programs running. Most processes can only be broken up a little (4 is about peak for most things today), and there is only so many processes running at one time, so once you exceed that number everything else sits idle. Even with just 12 threads I almost always have at least one core sitting idle, it shuffles around but it's quite common. Most people will not gain much if anything by going beyond 6-8 core/thread count.

It doesn't matter if you use Linux or Windows, this is the current state of software.
We're really at a point where the only really large gains now are no longer in hardware but in software, even RTX is only a couple generations from being where cpu cores are now. Our systems can't use all the cores and even when they can they are often left waiting on checks and balances not anything being crunched. We need an architecture change to make things really go much faster.  Frequency speed still matters to an extent, but that too is facing an issue of massive diminishing returns as well as manufacturing issues.

[-Jerry-]

Even with just 12 threads I almost always have at least one core sitting idle, it shuffles around but it's quite common.

This is interesting to see, with eight physical cores and no HT, I see the core load almost always spread evenly and no idle cores. Then again, maybe I've just got a lot of background processes.

[yui]

I'm still not getting quite the performance I want out of a Linux distro, though, on my, admittedly overkill computer.

3950x with 64 gigs of RAM and like a hundred hard drives. It doesn't seem like Linux scales as well to that kind of multi-core usage in the software I use.

so far i tested windows 10 pro, home, OpenSuse and Debian on my old server machine (dual opteron 4184, 64GB DDR3 ECC-Reg, R9 Nano, actually very cheap for what it is), so far windows never managed to use the whole 12 cores under synthetic loads, although perform slightly better at graphics, while on linux i could fully use 100% on 12 cores and use less ram but the gpu folding score was much lower. yes the load i used to test that was folding at home.

[Darthbaggins]

I'm still not getting quite the performance I want out of a Linux distro, though, on my, admittedly overkill computer.

3950x with 64 gigs of RAM and like a hundred hard drives. It doesn't seem like Linux scales as well to that kind of multi-core usage in the software I use.

so far i tested windows 10 pro, home, OpenSuse and Debian on my old server machine (dual opteron 4184, 64GB DDR3 ECC-Reg, R9 Nano, actually very cheap for what it is), so far windows never managed to use the whole 12 cores under synthetic loads, although perform slightly better at graphics, while on linux i could fully use 100% on 12 cores and use less ram but the gpu folding score was much lower. yes the load i used to test that was folding at home.

More than likely you were folding w/ the wrong GPU Driver set, alot of the times the newer driversets suck for Folding.  F@H was the reason why I started messing with Linux Distros, and for that I'm thankful since now I'm the primary tech at work that gets handed the big linux based projects.

Now for my main PC at home I do main w10 Enterprise so I can have some form of control over what MSFT can try to force to my machines and also since Lutris and other projects haven't grown support for some of the games I play.

[Leslieann]

This is interesting to see, with eight physical cores and no HT, I see the core load almost always spread evenly and no idle cores. Then again, maybe I've just got a lot of background processes.

During normal use, does it matter if a 4 core is loaded 10% per core while an 8 core is at 5% each or a 16core is at 2.5% each? In all cases the CPU isn't really working hard and likely waiting on other things to happen. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that more is better and one thread per process is the best but that difference is extremely minor so long as there is plenty of cores/threads and cpu cycles to go around and these days even a mid-range cpu has more than enough for the average person and daily use.

As for yours vs mine and the idle threads...
During normal use there's usually about 6-12 active processes at any one time using the cpu putting yours just right in the middle of that and mine at the upper end. In the case of our two systems, I'm guessing you have a 9700k vs my 8700k, you actually have more overall computing power than me it's just that mine is able to split the load across more threads than yours and occasionally the load simply doesn't justify it or simply can't branch off into another thread, hence mine occasionally having one go idle here and there.

I hope this explains it better, it's sort of a complex and difficult subject to try and explain and there is way more to it than this.


Also, I'm also not saying more isn't better, if you have an older system by all means upgrade, just don't buy into the idea that you need a ton of cores to game or browse the net. These high core/thread systems are actually so powerful that it's really difficult to load them up without purposely doing so. They don't necessary compress files faster, they compress files fast while editing a movie.  They don't run Virtualbox faster, they run 4 instances of it at once without slowing down. They don't run the game (much) faster, they run the game while live streaming. They let you do more, not necessarily faster.

so far i tested windows 10 pro, home, OpenSuse and Debian on my old server machine (dual opteron 4184, 64GB DDR3 ECC-Reg, R9 Nano, actually very cheap for what it is), so far windows never managed to use the whole 12 cores under synthetic loads, although perform slightly better at graphics, while on linux i could fully use 100% on 12 cores and use less ram but the gpu folding score was much lower. yes the load i used to test that was folding at home.

There was an issue with the Windows kernel and AMD cpus where people couldn't get full performance, one solution was to dedicate cpu 0 to managing the other cores. I know AMD and MS are aware of it but I'm not sure if they have a patch for it yet or not.

[Darthbaggins]

The recent mainstream offerings are why I've stuck w/ my x99 platform for so long, it has been a stable workhorse over the years and mainstream has finally caught up to it (running a 6900k - 8c16t).  I do like the direction AMD is heading, but until it's completely the norm and completely stable across all use cases is why I'll stick to what I have (yes I itch to build a new rig with the new "toys" on the market).  I need long term stability so it doesn't cost me a project, which is why I bounce between OS's dependent on what is the most stable on what platform (F@H I will always run on a Linux based platform, while my main work will be on w10 - until Adobe gets their act together on working w/ Linux as they're missing a whole demographic there - GiMP doesn't cut it for my use).
I still have my NUC to test things before I deploy when I want to tinker, and I have my son's rig to tinker with as well - which happens alot.

[Maledicted]

Windows 10 runs great on almost anything.
I wouldn't even want to try to run Windows 7 on that hardware, regardless of aero. Cortana being enabled is what eats the most pointless system resources in my experience, shutting her off means smooth sailing on most systems made in the last 10 years ... or more.

Linux the king of speed/efficiency though, of course.

Win7 runs just fine on them, the problem being you need to deal with SSD trim, drivers and GPT formatting, not to mentiond getting it installed to begin with as Intel has blocked anything but 10 on them. 7 was designed to run on 256megs of ram and scales quite well.

I'm usually not running SSDs in older systems. With Bay Trail systems, in particular, driver support even in Windows 8 and 10 is sketchy. Then you need a 32 bit EFI configuration to even boot. I don't recall whether or not I ever got Windows 7 running on Bay Trail hardware. Even Linux support has been horrendous without a bunch of random patches. I just now finally got Lubuntu 20.04 install from Linixium installed on my knockoff Bay Trail Compute Stick with just about everything working out of the box, besides maybe bluetooth. I forget whether or not it even has that. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has even, finally, come that far. Cherry Trail has been much better out of the gate, on both fronts. I really need to get my core M3 Compute Stick dusted off again.

Linux isn't always king.
I did a bunch of testing on this a while back. 10 would install and boot with only 512megs ram, it didn't run well but it would actually run. Ubuntu and quite a few others wouldn't install with less than 1 gig and when I got around that they had a ton of errors when you tried doing anything. However, once you did have a gig, Linux did run better. Though to be fair, Win10 did admirable considering, so long as you didn't install Chrome or need to update.

I imagine this was the 32 bit version of Windows 10? Lubuntu used to run quite nicely with 512mb. I haven't used it with that little RAM in some time though. Chrome shouldn't be installed on literally anything. All I ever use it for is printing Google documents at work.

Yes, there are distros designed for low resources but they aren't mainstream like Ubuntu, and it wasn't really Ubuntu's problem it's a desktop environment problem. Good luck convincing the average Win10 user to switch to a stripped down barebones XFCE or I3 interface if they don't have to, some people like that, but Windows users are used to eye candy.

Would you not consider Lubuntu mainstream? I had 19.04 with the new-ish LXQT desktop running on an old P4 Dell Dimension 3000 surprisingly well ... with the original IDE hard drive. I think it would still do nicely for light-medium web browsing. lol I think I did upgrade the RAM to about 1GB though. My uncle, knowing very little about computers, gave that dinosaur to me, so I figured why not make it somewhat usable and give it away to someone else?

Besides, maybe somebody, somewhere, desperately needed that 3.5" floppy drive. 

[Leslieann]

I'm usually not running SSDs in older systems. With Bay Trail systems, in particular, driver support even in Windows 8 and 10 is sketchy. Then you need a 32 bit EFI configuration to even boot. I don't recall whether or not I ever got Windows 7 running on Bay Trail hardware. Even Linux support has been horrendous without a bunch of random patches.

Linux on those systems was pretty easy you just need one or two files copies to the usb stick, been a while since I did Windows 7 on such a system (if ever), they were built for Win8. That split EFI was a stupid, stupid idea.

I imagine this was the 32 bit version of Windows 10? Lubuntu used to run quite nicely with 512mb. I haven't used it with that little RAM in some time though. Chrome shouldn't be installed on literally anything. All I ever use it for is printing Google documents at work.

All were 64bit because I was using Virtualbox to test browser memory scaling from 8-16 gigs and then decided to see how low they could go. A 32bit distro might have worked but I rarely do anything 32bit these days and many distros are dropping it entirely.

Would you not consider Lubuntu mainstream? I had 19.04 with the new-ish LXQT desktop running on an old P4 Dell Dimension 3000 surprisingly well ... with the original IDE hard drive. I think it would still do nicely for light-medium web browsing. lol I think I did upgrade the RAM to about 1GB though. My uncle, knowing very little about computers, gave that dinosaur to me, so I figured why not make it somewhat usable and give it away to someone else?

Any distro based on Ubuntu claiming low resources is a joke, but not for the reason you think.

There's a distro called Watt that claims to be specifically for that, do you know how much better it is than stock Ubuntu or even Mint? Almost zero. It's not that it's bad, it's that Ubuntu is actually really, really good right out of the box, it's hard to beat it even with something like Arch tuned to the hilt. Most of these groups are simply throwing a "light" desktop environment (D.E.) on it and calling it low resource. They may swap out some software here or there but for the most part it's Ubuntu with a different D.E., is it lower, yes, but Ubuntu did the real work.

I did some testing on this and basically if you have a newer CPU, and by new I mean anything made in the last 8 to 10 years, and more than 1 or 2gigs of ram there is very, very little to be gained using a "low resource" D.E. because the hardware enhancements (not computing power) offset the increased CPU use. In your case, yes it will help but you're also the exception not the rule as that is much older than what most people use today. You lack those enhancements so a newer D.E. is actually burden to the cpu, so old rules apply.

Keep in mind, apps also use these enhancements, and if the D.E. doesn't support them the app doesn't benefit either (depending on the enhancement), so while you "saved" resources on your desktop, Firefox and Chrome won't be able to use them either and if they can't then their load can actually be worse than if you had just used a D.E. that did support it. My understanding is that LXDE was this way, hence the development of LXQT.  In your case an LXDE distro would probably be better than LXQT since you can't use them anyhow.

[Maledicted]

I'm usually not running SSDs in older systems. With Bay Trail systems, in particular, driver support even in Windows 8 and 10 is sketchy. Then you need a 32 bit EFI configuration to even boot. I don't recall whether or not I ever got Windows 7 running on Bay Trail hardware. Even Linux support has been horrendous without a bunch of random patches.

Linux on those systems was pretty easy you just need one or two files copies to the usb stick, been a while since I did Windows 7 on such a system (if ever), they were built for Win8. That split EFI was a stupid, stupid idea.

That depends on the particular system I think. My knockoff compute stick had audio, wireless, bluetooth, and I think even sleep state issues ... maybe more, right out of the box in Linux for at least a few years.

I imagine this was the 32 bit version of Windows 10? Lubuntu used to run quite nicely with 512mb. I haven't used it with that little RAM in some time though. Chrome shouldn't be installed on literally anything. All I ever use it for is printing Google documents at work.

All were 64bit because I was using Virtualbox to test browser memory scaling from 8-16 gigs and then decided to see how low they could go. A 32bit distro might have worked but I rarely do anything 32bit these days and many distros are dropping it entirely.

I just asked because 32 bit Windows 10 seemed to run nice and lean vs 64 on the very low end.

Would you not consider Lubuntu mainstream? I had 19.04 with the new-ish LXQT desktop running on an old P4 Dell Dimension 3000 surprisingly well ... with the original IDE hard drive. I think it would still do nicely for light-medium web browsing. lol I think I did upgrade the RAM to about 1GB though. My uncle, knowing very little about computers, gave that dinosaur to me, so I figured why not make it somewhat usable and give it away to someone else?

Any distro based on Ubuntu claiming low resources is a joke, but not for the reason you think.

There's a distro called Watt that claims to be specifically for that, do you know how much better it is than stock Ubuntu or even Mint? Almost zero. It's not that it's bad, it's that Ubuntu is actually really, really good right out of the box, it's hard to beat it even with something like Arch tuned to the hilt. Most of these groups are simply throwing a "light" desktop environment (D.E.) on it and calling it low resource. They may swap out some software here or there but for the most part it's Ubuntu with a different D.E., is it lower, yes, but Ubuntu did the real work.

Maybe this is a recent development? Lubuntu, LXLE (is this even still maintained?), puppy, and others, have been my go-to on systems that would choke and die with the cinnamon flavor of mint (my preference), much less Ubuntu's unity abomination. I remember that when that first came out, it was eating more system resources than Windows 7 even was, so I promptly went back to Windows on that system. The timing probably couldn't have been better, since I believe that was just before the spyware fiasco.

I did some testing on this and basically if you have a newer CPU, and by new I mean anything made in the last 8 to 10 years, and more than 1 or 2gigs of ram there is very, very little to be gained using a "low resource" D.E. because the hardware enhancements (not computing power) offset the increased CPU use. In your case, yes it will help but you're also the exception not the rule as that is much older than what most people use today. You lack those enhancements so a newer D.E. is actually burden to the cpu, so old rules apply.

That was just an ancient system I made usable for kicks, and I don't like wasting functional hardware. It had previously been a long time since I had run anything on a P4.

Keep in mind, apps also use these enhancements, and if the D.E. doesn't support them the app doesn't benefit either (depending on the enhancement), so while you "saved" resources on your desktop, Firefox and Chrome won't be able to use them either and if they can't then their load can actually be worse than if you had just used a D.E. that did support it. My understanding is that LXDE was this way, hence the development of LXQT.  In your case an LXDE distro would probably be better than LXQT since you can't use them anyhow.

I think I tried LXDE on the same system and it was almost unusable, I may be mistaken though. I know I definitely wouldn't expect it to be functional. It made core 2 duo systems with minimal ram with aging mechanical drives relatively snappy, but I could tell there was only so much those systems could do these days with LXDE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Leslieann]

That depends on the particular system I think. My knockoff compute stick had audio, wireless, bluetooth, and I think even sleep state issues ... maybe more, right out of the box in Linux for at least a few years.

I was mostly concerend with the EFI, Ubuntu dealt with that party easy, other systems less so.

Unfortunately as you found they often use a lot of proprietary stuff, while they're kind of neat I pretty much gave up on them because of it. The non-knockoffs are not much better.  Buy a newer Pi, much easier.

Maybe this is a recent development? Lubuntu, LXLE (is this even still maintained?), puppy, and others, have been my go-to on systems that would choke and die with the cinnamon flavor of mint (my preference), much less Ubuntu's unity abomination. I remember that when that first came out, it was eating more system resources than Windows 7 even was, so I promptly went back to Windows on that system. The timing probably couldn't have been better, since I believe that was just before the spyware fiasco.

{combined}
I think I tried LXDE on the same system and it was almost unusable, I may be mistaken though. I know I definitely wouldn't expect it to be functional. It made core 2 duo systems with minimal ram with aging mechanical drives relatively snappy, but I could tell there was only so much those systems could do these days with LXDE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Timing did probably play a part but running a newer distro on an older system you face different challenges as software typically becomes more and more bloated with time. Linux is nowhere near as bad as Windows with this (it doesn't need to "add features" to create sales) but it's typical (XP's install size tripled over it's lifespan).

As for the P4, it was kind of garbage all along.
AMD was kicking it's butt for the first half of it's life (partly due to Intels Rambus) and not long after it finally got a good foothold Core 2 Duo came out and wiped the floor with it. The only bright stars in the lineup was the 805 and 820 and only because they could overclock like crazy... Provided you had the memory, PSU and oh gawd, the cooling. If there is one thing we should all be thankful for compared to old systems, it's cooling.

[Maledicted]

That depends on the particular system I think. My knockoff compute stick had audio, wireless, bluetooth, and I think even sleep state issues ... maybe more, right out of the box in Linux for at least a few years.

I was mostly concerend with the EFI, Ubuntu dealt with that party easy, other systems less so.

Unfortunately as you found they often use a lot of proprietary stuff, while they're kind of neat I pretty much gave up on them because of it. The non-knockoffs are not much better.  Buy a newer Pi, much easier.

Well, the good news is that, like I said previously, Linixium's latest Lubuntu respin seems to work perfectly on it without any tweaks. I believe it is the MeeGo Pad T01, which must have been one of the very earliest Intel sticks. I know I already had it before the real deal came out. It runs HOT, even after I hacked up the case, added a bunch of those little square adhesive-backed RAM heatsinks to the stock flat copper .... "heatsink", and zip tied a 40-ish mm fan to it and spliced to USB for exhaust. That was enough for it to stream 1080p Netflix without shutting itself off though. lol. The EMMC is too small for Windows updates, and it no longer runs so great on it anyway. I have a core M3 Compute Stick as well, which is wonderful (even though it gets far less use than it should).

I have an original Pi dedicated to a Pi-hole setup and a Pi 3 that I used as a mediaplayer in my car for a time.

Maybe this is a recent development? Lubuntu, LXLE (is this even still maintained?), puppy, and others, have been my go-to on systems that would choke and die with the cinnamon flavor of mint (my preference), much less Ubuntu's unity abomination. I remember that when that first came out, it was eating more system resources than Windows 7 even was, so I promptly went back to Windows on that system. The timing probably couldn't have been better, since I believe that was just before the spyware fiasco.

{combined}
I think I tried LXDE on the same system and it was almost unusable, I may be mistaken though. I know I definitely wouldn't expect it to be functional. It made core 2 duo systems with minimal ram with aging mechanical drives relatively snappy, but I could tell there was only so much those systems could do these days with LXDE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Timing did probably play a part but running a newer distro on an older system you face different challenges as software typically becomes more and more bloated with time. Linux is nowhere near as bad as Windows with this (it doesn't need to "add features" to create sales) but it's typical (XP's install size tripled over it's lifespan).

As for the P4, it was kind of garbage all along.
AMD was kicking it's butt for the first half of it's life (partly due to Intels Rambus) and not long after it finally got a good foothold Core 2 Duo came out and wiped the floor with it. The only bright stars in the lineup was the 805 and 820 and only because they could overclock like crazy... Provided you had the memory, PSU and oh gawd, the cooling. If there is one thing we should all be thankful for compared to old systems, it's cooling.
[/quote]

I have a few 130 watt Westmere processors. 

[phinix]

Win10 is ok.
I remember Windows 2000 SP3, one of the best...

[yui]

Win10 is ok.
I remember Windows 2000 SP3, one of the best...

agreed, still my favorite windows interface... so easy to get to everything. although not safe at all anymore...

[Darthbaggins]

Still have a soft spot for Win 3.1.

[tp4tissue]

Still have a soft spot for Win 3.1.

Runs MegaMan X gud'

[davidbachman]

linux user here ...

i do not want to answer that post ..i do not !!! ...


cheers ,

[yui]

although i do now own more windows 10 pc than anything else i clock much more time on linux at home and win 7 at work, i only use windows 10 for the folding pc(s) because i was completely inept at installing the amd pro drivers on debian...

[Crabby]

Linux Mint Cinnamon is comfortable and comprehensible for a Windows user.

Unless you need to do some actual work, in which case it's useless.

Personally I'm still clinging onto Windows 8.1 at the moment but due to everyone arbitrarily dropping support for it the day I have to upgrade to windows 10 is like a dark storm cloud on the horizon.

[Leslieann]

Linux Mint Cinnamon is comfortable and comprehensible for a Windows user.

Unless you need to do some actual work, in which case it's useless.

Yes, totally useless...

Most Hollywood films are now edited on Linux and have been for a while (particularly animation and lighting).
The internet runs on linux.
Most businesses have moved more and more online (Linux servers) and accessed through a browser which tends to be universal.
I have all my 3d printing and CNC software running native on Linux and Mac.
Photoshop? I have CS6 running in WINE on my desktop (I hate CC)  but GIMP is actually making inroads at schools. I also use PhotoPea which is like a free online Photoshop.
You can run Fusion 360 on Linux through the online version, WINE, or with a VM (Mac or Windows). There's also a few others that run native or in a browser dsuch as Blender, Tinkercad, Freecad, Brickscad, and more.

What can't I run?
A few AAA games
Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 (may be possible now, I haven't looked)
Solidworks, this is not due to technical reasons but because they really hate it running in any form other than native bare metal and put in several system checks to stop you from doing it. The last version I used it wasn't even allowed to run in VM which many had been doing for years.


You're ideas about Linux are about 5-10 years behind the reality.
That isn't to say it's an easy switch, the more you know about Windows the more difficult the transition which is where most people get tripped up. They get frustrated because they know how to do it the "easy way" on Windows and want it all to be that way on Linux. The truth is, every OS has it's highs and low points. If Windows works for you, great, but you get over this idea that everything else is useless. Even Microsoft acknowledged that the desktop OS's days are numbered, not that it's dead or going to die, only that it's disappearing into the background and that what OS you use is unimportant. Which is precisely how it should be. When you use a browser do you care what OS it runs on? When you edit a photo do you care what OS it runs on? So long as it runs, who cares what's behind it.

[yui]

The internet runs on linux.

i 2nd that trying to develop websites on Windows is a nightmare compared to linux, i'd love for my boss to allow me a linux server, but he does not know how to work it so it's a no.
As for games the list of game not running on proton is growing smaller and smaller, and i was surprised as the controller support out of the box, ps2 and ps3 controllers are just plug and play (well for ps2 you need a physical adapter) i have not tried a ps4 controller yet because of the price of it.

[Sintpinty]

*angry cortana noises*

[switchnollie]

I love my Win10 installation, no problems and its faster and more secure.

It's working nicely for me as well

[noisyturtle]

How can anyone abide by forced updates? Even when you set them for as far away as possible if MS deems it a needed update they force you to take it regardless of your settings. Have fun waking up to your computer reset. Were you compiling something or running a server? Haha **** you! RESET!

[yui]

How can anyone abide by forced updates? Even when you set them for as far away as possible if MS deems it a needed update they force you to take it regardless of your settings. Have fun waking up to your computer reset. Were you compiling something or running a server? Haha **** you! RESET!

there are some cludgy workarounds, like preventing your pc from communicating with MS until you want the update (if it does not know there is an update it will not do the update) but you need an hardware firewall to implement it, there is also the ameliorated edition that exist, with no microsoft products preinstalled inside including windows update

[Leslieann]

Plus start menu ads, unexpected changes, spying... It's literally become malware.
Workarounds? You shouldn't need to hack the OS much less install a hardware firewall just to keep it from doing malware like things.

[noisyturtle]

Plus start menu ads, unexpected changes, spying... It's literally become malware.
Workarounds? You shouldn't need to hack the OS much less install a hardware firewall just to keep it from doing malware like things.

At least with Linux you have to write a function to get it to do something specific you want. With Win10 you need to tell it to stop.

[yui]

Plus start menu ads, unexpected changes, spying... It's literally become malware.
Workarounds? You shouldn't need to hack the OS much less install a hardware firewall just to keep it from doing malware like things.

i do agree and it is why all my actual personal computers are running linux, but it is not something you can always do, i asked at work and the answer was a hard no, for example, and some peoples will not be willing to transition, when i build a pc for someone i always ask them if they want to try, and the answer has always been no, and running radeon pro or nividia cuda drivers on linux is a pain too (never managed to do it), so my 2 GPU folding machines both run 10... although they just run 24-7 and so do not require much of anything from me even with 10 on them.
so yeas pretty much all Microsoft products are now malwares but when you are forced to use them you find workarounds.

[Leslieann]

At least with Linux you have to write a function to get it to do something specific you want. With Win10 you need to tell it to stop.

Yes, but Linux doesn't (usually) come along later and wipe all of it out on purpose.

I've met very few Linux users who didn't have a cheat sheet but only because it's done so rarely you never have a chance to memorize it. In contrast not only do I still remember specific registry hacks, for a long time I had my Windows key memorized. I wasn't the only one who did the latter.

radeon pro or nividia cuda drivers on linux is a pain too

For my Radeon I didn't need anything special except when trying to use a pass through, the open source drivers are that good.
Radeon and Nvidia are both easy to install (at least on the distros I use), whether Nvidia works or not is never guaranteed.