Which version of Linux to install?

[lsemmens]

Whilst Linux is a very good OS and excels in many areas. Windoze still has a huge market share, and, like it or not, a huge support base. You, Spook, tend to whinge and moan about anything that does not agree with your world view. Maybe, just maybe, Linux compatibility is not a priority since it only has a miniscule The only place a *nix system is king is in the large file server area. Strangely enough, every business, small or large, that I have dealt with don't seem to know anything bout *nix, or the many variants. From experience, Linux doe have buggy software, and little, or no support for legacy hardware. A simple thing like a dual monitor setup, running each monitor at different resolutions and refresh rates, springs to mind here. For many people Microsoft Office is still the only system that works for them. I have played with many and varied open source office packages and have always returned to Office because - I can easily synch a smart phone to it without a lot of stuffing around. The various database packages are nowhere near as good as Access until you go to SQL which is a steep learning curve for many. Automation is another area where Linux requires more than little skill, which the average user does not even want to think about. I have also discovered that many of the Linux groups tend to be very parochial and newbies only just tolerated. I love the Open Source construct, and attempt to use it where I can but, unfortunately, there are still some things that Windoze does better. As for your attacks upon religion, these are totally unwarranted in this thread.

[spook]

Personal attacks, why am I not surprised at such typical ideological rage. As an uneducated cretin, I may not get things right at times and apologise if I've upset your apple cart, or is that, windows viewpoint.

You don't know my world view, it's nothing like what I post. Facts to the best of my knowledge, rather than ideological denial, apologetics and delusion. My comment on god, was as a parallel.

Linux has over 80% of the smartphone and tablet market, it controls close to 90% of world servers and many other organisations including NASA. Every electronic gizmo's you use, runs a unix/linux system The business you may deal with probably aren't at the cutting edge of technology. The people I deal with in business, are mostly in media and innovation industries, where state of the art, reliability, security, adaptability, control and ease of use are more important then clinging to the dying past. Sure, microsoft has a strangle hold over the urban jungle plebs, because the propaganda says linux is useless, not up to scratch and windows/apple are the ants pants and at the peak of the technological evolution. When the facts are the opposite.

Don't have much to do with linux forums, no real need as I'm not a developer or have a great inkling to change things under the hood. But never come across a linux forums where people are rude or off putting of others, other than the one or two you find in forums. Mostly they are very helpful, the problem is, newbies to linux. As for legacy hardware, try my 1999 compaq laptop with 256k ram and a 10gig HD running recent release linux very successfully.

Try running windows on that machine and see how you go. This thread has brought forward some interesting things, especially what you have to do to dual boot using windows, compared to in the past. From easy to hard.

[Skepticist]

Just an update on the method I outlined earlier - resounding success
It just might save someone some time and frustration

I had an Acronis backup of both Win and Mint that were installed and fully updated, optimised and additional packages installed under UEFI that didn't coexist harmoniously.
So the brief method is to first make those backup(s)
important: make sure the Mint partition you backup is no larger than than the partition you intend to put it back into (or Acronis won't let you restore it).
Laptop hardware drivers can be a PITA to find online so you need to preserve your existing Windows installation to avoid all that grief.

Boot the Win setup disk in UEFI mode and use DISKPART to CLEAN the entire HDD (kills the EFI partition)
Boot the Win install disk in MBR mode and do the most basic installation of windows offline
Make certain the WIn install is working
Boot Acronis from USB drive or CD and restore the Win partition only (not the EFI) from the backup to the HDD over the new Win install and you should have Win working exactly as it was originally with everything intact.

Very important: open disk management in windows and make certain the windows partition is flagged as 'active' - if not mark it as 'active' (so GRUB will detect the Windows installation and place it in the list for you)
(In my case that partition was flagged as 'system, boot, crash dump, primary partition' but not active )

Then boot up the Mint install disk in MBR mode and you'll have the option to install alongside windows and the GRUB menu will be created for boot selection of both OS's.

This last bit only applies if you have a partition backup of Mint installed earlier:

Last step was to recover the fully optimised & updated Mint partition I'd created earlier over the top of the basic install. Booting it up will need selection of the drive in BIOS at boot because the GRUB entries are most likely incorrect in that backup (in my case it came from a different HDD in a multi drive system).
All it needed then was to do a sudo update-grub in terminal to pick up and configure the correct OS partitions and all done and working sweetly.

I won't get into the politics of OS's as they all have their pros & cons and I have to use windows for work otherwise I'd be seriously considering ditching it altogether for 'nix type systems. In my workplace there'd be a mass outcry and anxiety if everyone had to learn a new OS and applications so windows will endure there for some time yet.

[Guiseppe]

. Got a really old laptop with 256k ram and a massive 10G drive, it runs puppy Linux really well.

"Puppy" runs well. For experimental purposes I suggest download Puppy and burn it to create a LiveCD. You then run the LiveCD and the OS loads into RAM. This means that nothing is touched on your machine unless you specifically tell Puppy to do so.

If you click on some of the links on the page I linked you will go to the Puppy forum. I visit now and again but as I am running a really old version I am not much help with questions about the later versions. The forum is quite active and you will get all the support you may need.

EDIT: I should have mentioned the download is about 100MB. Note the size does not detract from the OS' capability - it simply means that there is no bloat-ware.

[spook]

I'm running 5.3.3 puppy, quite a good advancement from earlier releases. There are a number of puppy alternatives, intend trying a few out over time, as there are lots of PC's being dumped by windows users because they won't run win10. Not much to load puppy or another linux and pass them on to those who need a decent computer and can't afford them or can't handle the never ending problems with bloatware,