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lostone

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I have an old PC (4-5 years) with Windows 10. Since Microsoft is dropping coverage of 10, and the hardware on this this old PC will not support 11, I have to either toss it or move it to another operating system. I decided to try Linux Lite. I am lazy and old and not very energic, so I got a Linux Lite install USB drive. It all installed OK, but Chrome does not work. Is it easier to dig a bit and figure out how to download a workable version of Chrome, or just to try another downloadable version of Linux? They only run 15-20 dollars or so.

I despise Microsoft. They have sold too many people the same bridge too many times. I have an operational 11 laptop, but want to get away from under Microsoft's paw. It's not the money, it's that I feel like I am being robbed by Microsoft over and over again.
 
lostone said:
Chrome does not work
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What happens when you try to use Chrome?
lostone said:
Is it easier to dig a bit and figure out how to download a workable version of Chrome, or just to try another downloadable version of Linux?
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It depends on your appetite for digging.

I would start by troubleshooting the existing Chrome, then try installing Chromium instead. Chromium is the project Chrome is built on and is basically identical to Chrome in form and function.

(Google Chrome should probably only be installed via Google's package repository. But that is extra work to set up and likely isn't worth the effort.)
 
lostone said:
or just to try another downloadable version of Linux? They only run 15-20 dollars or so.
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If you are paying for Linux, you are being robbed. Linux is free open source software; You don't pay for it. (Unless you really like a particular distro and want to voluntarily donate to its development team).

There are some distros like Red Hat Enterprise Linux that do cost money to license, but unless you are running critical business software and need the support of the vendor to be immediately available if you encounter issues, you don't need that.

The USB stick itself might cost money; But they are reuseable.

Downloading a distro and burning it to a bootable USB stick is not hugely difficult.

Also, a 4-5 year old computer can probably run a full sized modern linux distro like Mint or Ubuntu without any drama; Lite distros are good for really old hardware, like the fifteen year old netbook I recently salvaged (it came with Vista, and had been updated to Windows 7, but ran like a dog under 7). I put Anti-X linux on it, and it works very well indeed (for such an old machine). Anti-X is a pretty good lightweight distro for really old hardware, but it's just one of many.

Linux has a stupidly bewildering array of distros available, so you can find one to suit almost any use case - if you are prepared to dig. But in my experience, Mint is one of the best ways to go for people transitioning from Windows.

And as Bigfield says, Chromium is likely a better choice than Chrome, unless you are super wedded to Google - in which case, installing Chrome directly from Google's repository is the way to go.
 
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bilby said:
Also, a 4-5 year old computer can probably run a full sized modern linux distro like Mint or Ubuntu without any drama
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10 year old PC can run any modern linux distro provided it is 64bit and has at least 4GB RAM.
 
barbos said:
bilby said:
Also, a 4-5 year old computer can probably run a full sized modern linux distro like Mint or Ubuntu without any drama
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10 year old PC can run any modern linux distro provided it is 64bit and has at least 4GB RAM.
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Quite.

Microsoft are very keen for people to believe that any hardware more than a couple of years old is 'outdated' and must be thrown out and replaced; But that's not been true for a long time - it probably was in the 1990s, when hardware was evolving very rapidly, but these days its more of an ingrained habit than an actual necessity to upgrade so frequently - unless you are doing bleeding edge stuff such as playing the latest and greatest games.

The "hardware requirements" that make many Win10 machines obsolete as Win11 platforms are entirely an artifice of the M$ marketing department; They don't reflect any fundamental obsolesence of older hardware.

Microsoft have been in a synergistic marketing drive with hardware vendors for a long time, and both sides are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for reasons to force consumers to buy their increasingly underwhelming new products.
 
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MS Office is virtually functionally unchanged from its initial releases back in the early 90s - they have sold us the same bridge over and over again
 
lostone said:
MS Office is virtually functionally unchanged from its initial releases back in the early 90s - they have sold us the same bridge over and over again
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The last decent version of Excel* was 2003. After that, the marketing people took over from the spreadsheet people, and functionality and ease of use were sacrificed in the altar of branding and 'look'. MS Office has been on a steady march of enshittification ever since.












*Excel was the last holdout; Word, Outlook &c. were already screwed at that point.
 
I was a bug fan of Linux years ago. Ubuntu was my flavor of choice. I wish the consumer market promote Linux better. I haven't touched Linux for years but I have been meaning to revisit again. I never paid for Linux before, is paying for it normal now? I would try Linux Mint which has a pretty good reputation.
 
TSwizzle said:
I wish the consumer market promote Linux better.
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Then you either don't understand what a "consumer market" is; or you don't understand what FOSS is; or you don't understand what promoting a product "better" entails.

Hint: It's all about money. How much money is changing hands when someone installs Ubuntu on their computer?

TSwizzle said:
I never paid for Linux before, is paying for it normal now?
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No. That's a major selling point, and simultaneously the reason for the lack of promotion.

Microsoft are awash with money to promote Windows; Some comes from selling licences to users, but most comes from selling users to advertisers, which is why their products are utter crap, and sell very well regardless.

FOSS does neither. And so it cannot compete for promotional and marketing eyeballs with those who do.

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
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You can opt out; But you cannot beat them at the advertsing game - that's the only game they still play competently, and is arguably the only thing they now do at all.

And if I haven’t made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that’s burdensomely slow, and full of targeted advertisements and content baked into the operating system in a way that’s either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people — and it really could be tens of millions considering the ubiquity of these laptops in eCommerce stores alone — the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com — the very first page you see when you open a web browser — immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes simply don’t load.

Every part of the operating system seems to be hounding you to use some sort of Microsoft product or some sort of product that Microsoft or the laptop manufacturer has been paid to make you see. While one can hope that the people buying these laptops have any awareness of anything, the reality is that they’re being dumped into a kind of TJ Maxx version of computing, except TJ Maxx clothes don’t sometimes scream at you to download TJ Maxx Plus or stop functioning because you used them too fast.

Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn’t because this is big business — it’s because laptop sales have been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers (and Microsoft) need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to consumers.
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(source).
 
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Well, computer makers sometimes choose to sell their shit with linux pre-installed. They can save money and "promote" linux that way. In Russia thanks to sanctions, government entities are pushed toward local linux distro, for which you have to pay though.
 
bilby said:
(source).
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Ever wonder why your workplace uses Sharepoint and other horrible Microsoft apps? That’s because Microsoft’s massive software monopoly meant that it was cheaper for your boss to buy all of it in one place, and thus its incentive is to make it good enough to convince your boss to sign up for all of their stuff rather than an app that makes your life easier or better.
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I watched this decision-making process in real time, recently.

It goes like this:
  1. Manager decides they're going to use the Microsoft product, as usual.
  2. Manager goes through protracted technical review process which makes it very clear that the Microsoft product (Sharepoint, lol) is a bag of shit that nobody wants, and that there are several better competing options.
  3. Manager gets approval to buy the Microsoft product because the paperwork is easy.
  4. Everyone eats shit.
 
barbos said:
Well, computer makers sometimes choose to sell their shit with linux pre-installed. They can save money and "promote" linux that way. In Russia thanks to sanctions, government entities are pushed toward local linux distro, for which you have to pay though.
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I bet it's loaded with malware.
 
barbos said:
10 year old PC can run any modern linux distro provided it is 64bit and has at least 4GB RAM.
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That is mine. 'antiX - base version' ((:, as its chief, anti-capitalista would like it to be called). Small, nimble (fastest loading). Very helpful community when you need it. Why take on Chrome or Chromium. Firefox-esr + Duckduckgo (search engine or Startpage) are enough. And freely download whatever else you need.
(Note: antiX comes with seamonkey browser. You can remove it and load Firefox-esr).
Why just Microsoft, say good-bye to Google as well.
'antiX' has a Full version also.

Linux is like Hinduism. All options are open and you do not play anything except a donation to the OS you like.
 
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