Alternatives to Windows 10

[sorasmemories]

The company I work for mainly uses Windows 7. In 2020, Windows 7 will no longer be supported; so, we're starting our slow and steady move to Windows 10. My experience with preparing our new Windows 10 image is the most experience I've gotten with it thus far. Of course I've used it; but, this time around, I'm setting it up and testing it for our users.

 

My personal computer is a Windows 8.1. I've had it a little over five years and intend to build a new PC soon. I was going to do Windows 10... until I started working on it professionally. You can't turn off Cortana. Microsoft actually disabled the ability to prevent the appstore from doing things without your permission. It's basically got built in spamware and it installs apps without your permission. Candy crush... March of Empires... Seriously??? This is acceptable???

 

For a long time, alternative OS's, aka linux, couldn't compare because there just weren't linux friendly versions of anything. I'm hoping someone who is more knowledgeable than me can tell me... Is there a good alternative to Windows10 that won't suffer the traditional "linux limitations"? Maybe I'm just a fossil and am not aware that those limitations don't exist anymore. Or... am I doomed to actually pay money for Microsoft's disaster?

[Aleks NE]

2 minutes ago, sorasmemories said:

The company I work for mainly uses Windows 7. In 2020, Windows 7 will no longer be supported; so, we're starting our slow and steady move to Windows 10. My experience with preparing our new Windows 10 image is the most experience I've gotten with it thus far. Of course I've used it; but, this time around, I'm setting it up and testing it for our users.

 

My personal computer is a Windows 8.1. I've had it a little over five years and intend to build a new PC soon. I was going to do Windows 10... until I started working on it professionally. You can't turn off Cortana. Microsoft actually disabled the ability to prevent the appstore from doing things without your permission. It's basically got built in spamware and it installs apps without your permission. Candy crush... March of Empires... Seriously??? This is acceptable???

 

For a long time, alternative OS's, aka linux, couldn't compare because there just weren't linux friendly versions of anything. I'm hoping someone who is more knowledgeable than me can tell me... Is there a good alternative to Windows10 that won't suffer the traditional "linux limitations"? Maybe I'm just a fossil and am not aware that those limitations don't exist anymore. Or... am I doomed to actually pay money for Microsoft's disaster?

I use MEMEDOWS 10(as im forced to for some applications), and Fedora for everything else. The only thing that i cannot do on linux is photo/video editing. I'd recommend Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu as they're all fairly easy to learn/adapt to.

[Sauron]

Incompatibility with professional applications will always be a limitation of less popular systems, that's just the way it works - there is less demand for a linux port, so adobe won't make one.

 

With that said, nowadays you can get a lot done with open source alternatives and open source desktop environments have come a long way. If you don't absolutely need adobe software or ms office then you should be able to use a linux distribution without issues for most tasks.

[Princess Luna]

Windows 10 can be the best OS ever, the only problem is that you've to take enough time editing it in order to achieve the desirable experience.

 

You can uninstall all the apps, including the store altogether, disable notification center, use a local adm account without any Microsoft account deal, kill cortana for good, re-enable the old start menu and windows photo viewer, old windows search bar... all can be done... you just need to give yourself  the trouble to learn the registry tweaks, use classic shell... and so on.

 

[kirashi]

On 5/3/2018 at 9:52 AM, sorasmemories said:

Is there a good alternative to Windows10 that won't suffer the traditional "linux limitations"?

What limitations are we speaking of? I won't try to hide the fact that most software used by business or creative professionals is unavailable on Linux, such as Microsoft Office or the Adobe Suite. Yes, there are alternatives, but when you've got co-workers or clients all using the proper versions of this software, running something like OpenOffice or Inkscape isn't really an option. Keep in mind this is NOT a limitation of Linux - this is a limitation imposed by the developers of the software you want to use, since they are the ones responsible for writing a Linux-compatible version of their software.

 

That being said, it sounds like you're just getting your feet wet with Windows 10 in a business environment (apologies if you've been doing this for years, but this is what it sounds like to me) and have not yet learned about the wonders of enterprise deployment and the Group Policy editor. If you're deploying your Windows images properly as one should in a business environment, you can do all sorts of restrictive things with Enterprise or Professional version of Windows via the Group Policy editor on a group or even user-by-user basis. This means you indeed can disable Cortana, either via gpedit.msc or a forced registry key.

[JoostinOnline]

On 5/3/2018 at 12:07 PM, Princess Cadence said:

Windows 10 can be the best OS ever, the only problem is that you've to take enough time editing it in order to achieve the desirable experience.

 

You can uninstall all the apps, including the store altogether, disable notification center, use a local adm account without any Microsoft account deal, kill cortana for good, re-enable the old start menu and windows photo viewer, old windows search bar... all can be done... you just need to give yourself  the trouble to learn the registry tweaks, use classic shell... and so on.

 

That's true, but also at the same time it's not. With every new distro, Microsoft has been disabling discovered workarounds. None of the registry hacks I applied when I first downloaded Windows 10 work with 1803. A bunch or stuff in Group Policy Editor doesn't even work anymore. It's a constant battle, which isn't good if you're trying to manage a bunch of computers in a business.

 

@OP Ubuntu is always a popular option. I recommend you get some flash drives and install live distros of whatever people suggest on here. You can quickly compare them, and even boot it up on an employees computer for an opinion.

[Dat Guy]

If you are not interested in configuring your Windows 10 so that it behaves sanely, every other OS will disappoint you as well.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

On 5/3/2018 at 10:05 AM, Sauron said:

Incompatibility with professional applications will always be a limitation of less popular systems, that's just the way it works - there is less demand for a linux port, so adobe won't make one.

 

With that said, nowadays you can get a lot done with open source alternatives and open source desktop environments have come a long way. If you don't absolutely need adobe software or ms office then you should be able to use a linux distribution without issues for most tasks.

LibreOffice is a surprisingly good substitute for Ms Office. Even though I'm still using Win 7 and have Office 2010, I'm using LibreOffice exclusively. If all you need from Adobe is PDF creation and editing, PDF Studio Pro 12 is actually superior to Adobe Acrobat Standard, costs one heck of a lot (it's also not subscripton based) and is not cloud based.

On 5/3/2018 at 10:07 AM, Princess Cadence said:

Windows 10 can be the best OS ever, the only problem is that you've to take enough time editing it in order to achieve the desirable experience...

 

How do you edit it to keep updates from rendering some programs incompatible?

4 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

If you are not interested in configuring your Windows 10 so that it behaves sanely, every other OS will disappoint you as well.

That's just absurd!

[Dat Guy]

It's not.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

LibreOffice is a surprisingly good substitute for Ms Office. Even though I'm still using Win 7 and have Office 2010, I'm using LibreOffice exclusively. If all you need from Adobe is PDF creation and editing, PDF Studio Pro 12 is actually superior to Adobe Acrobat Standard, costs one heck of a lot (it's also not subscripton based) and is not cloud based.

That doesn't matter, many workplaces don't allow you to use whatever software you want to do your work - if they ask you to write a MS Word document, that document had better be a perfect .docx with no conversion artifacts.

[Dat Guy]

Wouldn't that make SoftMaker Office a good substitution? Last time I checked, they had perfect support for DOCX/XLSX with no artifacts.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That doesn't matter, many workplaces don't allow you to use whatever software you want to do your work - if they ask you to write a MS Word document, that document had better be a perfect .docx with no conversion artifacts.

True that. it would require an entire office to convert over.

 

One way around the incompatibility issue is to save documents as PDF, something that is easy to do in LibreOffice. In fact, one can set LO to embed the original LO document into the PDF to make future editing even simpler. One can then just open the PDF in LO and edit away. PDFs are a great way to bridge software and platform gaps. I save all my documents I create in LO to PDFs now since they are so easy to edit hen the orignal LO document is embeded in it.

 

The only time saving to PDF might not work well is if someone outside the office, such as in another company, needed to be able to edit the dcoument or otherwise contribute to it (other than fill in the blanks on a form).

[TechyBen]

On 03/05/2018 at 5:52 PM, sorasmemories said:

The company I work for mainly uses Windows 7. In 2020, Windows 7 will no longer be supported; so, we're starting our slow and steady move to Windows 10. My experience with preparing our new Windows 10 image is the most experience I've gotten with it thus far. Of course I've used it; but, this time around, I'm setting it up and testing it for our users.

 

My personal computer is a Windows 8.1. I've had it a little over five years and intend to build a new PC soon. I was going to do Windows 10... until I started working on it professionally. You can't turn off Cortana. Microsoft actually disabled the ability to prevent the appstore from doing things without your permission. It's basically got built in spamware and it installs apps without your permission. Candy crush... March of Empires... Seriously??? This is acceptable???

 

For a long time, alternative OS's, aka linux, couldn't compare because there just weren't linux friendly versions of anything. I'm hoping someone who is more knowledgeable than me can tell me... Is there a good alternative to Windows10 that won't suffer the traditional "linux limitations"? Maybe I'm just a fossil and am not aware that those limitations don't exist anymore. Or... am I doomed to actually pay money for Microsoft's disaster?

When I had a second bodge/spare PC, I was running linux dual boot... currently I'm a little tight on HDDs on this build, so I have not yet (games take up a LOT of space ). But if I get a bigger SSD etc... I'll probably go back to it. I liked using Linux, because it was like using Win 7... it did not break things unless I broke them!

[Guest]

I've tried pretty hard to move to linux. Windows just has all the good programs on it. 

Also linux has absurd driver issues at times and sometimes requires excess knowledge of certain things. IE connecting to WiFi on Ubuntu is probably the most tedious process I've ever had the displeasure of trying to do. 
Barnacules Nerdgasm is a youtuber that has some guides on how to disable a lot of telemetry and whatnot. 2-3 videos I think. Unless you want to buy a mac or you don't need many programs, you can try and Linux Distro, BSD variant, Unix variant or other less known operating system. 

[athosdewitt]

Windows 10  1607 LTSB - short version: comes without preinstalled programs in start menu and in general long version: google

i have installed something related with xbox and windows store to be able to play/use the store and good old windows photo viewer trough some scripts.

And why this particular one?

pros  1607 works like a charm and very light on updates only critical ones.. 1 in a month or 2?.

feels like was installed just yesterday  boot fast runs fast

fewer cycle of superfetch and prefetch to encounter 100% hard disk in use.

privacy.. at least on paper. but will be violated by precious google chrome anyway

cons.. you might have to search quite deep to get a legit license or a  i think there's a workaround with the trial 30 day copy  and for those scripts because i don't have em anymore.

[Filthyscum]

Use Linux (for example Tumbleweed, as it is a rolling release and easy to use), and for the few applications you need windows for just fire up a VM. You can even pass it hardware, like GPUs, harddrives etc., but for general office use that's not really needed imho.

 

Edit for personal experience: I work for an organization that is 100% Microsoft, and some tasks require Excel (LibreOffice Calc isn't as good, sad but true). Running the home office in a VM; hassle free all day and no taint other than in the image file. 

[Tokyo_Raven]

On 5/3/2018 at 6:52 PM, sorasmemories said:

The company I work for mainly uses Windows 7. In 2020, Windows 7 will no longer be supported; so, we're starting our slow and steady move to Windows 10. My experience with preparing our new Windows 10 image is the most experience I've gotten with it thus far. Of course I've used it; but, this time around, I'm setting it up and testing it for our users.

 

My personal computer is a Windows 8.1. I've had it a little over five years and intend to build a new PC soon. I was going to do Windows 10... until I started working on it professionally. You can't turn off Cortana. Microsoft actually disabled the ability to prevent the appstore from doing things without your permission. It's basically got built in spamware and it installs apps without your permission. Candy crush... March of Empires... Seriously??? This is acceptable???

 

For a long time, alternative OS's, aka linux, couldn't compare because there just weren't linux friendly versions of anything. I'm hoping someone who is more knowledgeable than me can tell me... Is there a good alternative to Windows10 that won't suffer the traditional "linux limitations"? Maybe I'm just a fossil and am not aware that those limitations don't exist anymore. Or... am I doomed to actually pay money for Microsoft's disaster?

1) You can always remove metro apps with powershell or request Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB. I built couple of computers with Windows 10 and always as soon as I landed I went into powershell and typed "Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage". After that I went to MS Edge and downloaded Classic Shell so it can emulate start button from my favorite and legendary OS Windows 7. After start button was ready, I also downloaded and installed Spybot Anti-Beacon which blocks spying and telemetry. After that I just updated Windows to latest version, reinstall drivers to ensure Windows didn't miss some important and got software up and running.

 

2) This is a bit better on in my opinion cause you can have two worlds of OSes crammed into one PC and I use this one. I got Linux up and running with latest updates and drivers. I went and installed KVM & Virt Manager. After that I passthroughed some PCI devices with VFIO driver into KVM for certain workloads (in my case HBA card with 4 drives attached on it, Radeon RX 580 & ASUS Xonar DGX). After I verified that devices have been passthroughed, I proceeded and prepared my KVM switch for function of switching between VM and physical computer. I went ahead and created VM with none devices active in VM just to install Windows or Linux without issues I turned off KVM virtual machine and passthroughed devices (one by one to make troubleshooting easier). After successful passthrough I went and configured VM's to run my certain workload (Gaming VM, mySQL VM).... I've run in couple of issues during that adventure but it paid off cause it made my journey for learning Linux way easier and showed beauty of Linux.

[jde3]

On 5/3/2018 at 8:52 AM, sorasmemories said:

there just weren't linux friendly versions of anything.

Not sure what you mean, In my experience Linux has better versions of everything.

 

Windows Command Shell vs. Linux Terminals

Explorer vs. Thunar, Nautilus, Dolphin

Windows File Shares vs. NFS

Google Chrome vs. Chrommium

Windows Media Player vs. All the various media players on Linux

iTunes vs. Lollipop, Banshee

Nothing vs. System wide application upgrades like zypper, apt, dnf

Nothing vs. Snapshot filesystems like ZFS

Nothing vs. Corebird

Nothing vs. KDE Connect

Nothing (nothing good) vs. Variety

Nothing? vs. Seahorse, KDE Wallet & GPG integration.

All the bad backup programs vs. DejaDup, Tarsnap

Whatever it's called on Windows vs. Pulse Audio

 

And just the system integration in general works better on Linux, you contacts calendar online accounts etc is all integrated better in Gnome and KDE than in Windows. Just an observation.. not zealotry.. Not trying to pick a platform fight. Linux does a lot right for the overall health and sanity of a general computer user. Windows doesn't have "all the good software", you may just not know what the good software is called on Linux as there are not ad's for it and sometimes you have to discover it.

[MattPrime]

I think people largely tend to stick with Windows because that is the platform the majority of games are (at least primarily) released on. I know Valve made a big push to Linux with SteamOS and OSX too, and I think that has helped a lot, but still many games seem to release on Windows first.

 

I expect someone with superior knowledge to me will mention WINE, but I am unsure of the compatibility of WINE with the latest games and graphics APIs those games use. Anyone care to weigh-in on that?

 

A colleague of mine does strongly recommend LTSB if you can get hold of a copy. He is an advocate for privacy and avoids apps with heavy telemetry (Google Chrome is apparently a big offender) and uses VPNs for all his online activities too.

[TheMountain28]

You can take ubuntu gnome, i recommend the last version update. It sure you will need some pratice for become a user of Ubuntu gnome, but you will find a good alternative. I use WPS for writer or open office, i install antidote, steam, firefox and chrome, clementine, skype, cheese, lutris for gaming (you can play league of legend without problem). That not perfect, but you have a lot of very good feature like tweak tool. And the most funny thing is the shortcut keyboard with the touch SUPER for swipe your screen window. Your desktop is always clean, not to much icon and that very stable distro.

 

I hope you will do the good choice, good luck!

[Giganthrax]

Been using Win10 for some years now and I think it's the best OS MS has ever released. I've no idea what spamware the OP is talking about, and I don't even really know what Cortana is aside from vague things I've learned from hearsay because I disabled everything about it from day 1. I've never had Win10 install anything on my computer on its own. 

 

This may be because, the moment I got the Win10 free upgrade on my laptop (which was a huge improvement over the godawful 8.1), I followed the instructions in these two links:

 

https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s-built-in-apps-and-how-to-reinstall-them/

 

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-completely-disable-Windows-10-spying

 

I also disabled nearly all graphical options in Win10 to make it easier for my crappy laptop to handle. 

 

Win10 is a great mainstream OS and you should seriously give it a chance, especially if you already managed to endure the awful Win8. The fact you don't even have to activate it to use it to its full potential (except for OS graphical options, but hey) means it's actually as cheap as linux.