cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30792652
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer. But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
If you bought your computer after 2010, there’s most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.
Installing an operating system may sound difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. With any luck, there are people in your area ready to help!
5 Reasons to upgrade your old computer to Linux:
- No New Hardware, No Licensing Costs
- Enhanced Privacy
- Good For The Planet
- Community & Professional Support
- Better User Control
My PC had been running like shit for a while and I was already weighing up options for replacing it, when I got the popup message from MS about Windows 10 expiring, and how my only option was to dump the PC. So I installed Linux out of pure spite. Runs like a dream now. Thanks Microsoft!
If you bought your computer after 2010, there’s most likely no reason to throw it out.
Frist of all, how dare yo u
The average retail store where I live is still selling computers with 6+ years old CPUs as “gamer edition”.
I need Microcenter to branch out internationally so these retailers can finally stop this bullshit tactic.
That was only 14nm+++.
I just toss it in a lake so the fish can have internet.
Coral habitat
Corel draw joke in there somewhere
Ain’t no coral in lakes!
Technicalities
You don’t need to buy a new computer. You just need to upgrade your old computer.
To Linux.
Which then makes it run like a new computer. So Linux basically gives you a free new computer.
Hmm Windows 10 LTSC and IOT will still be supported until 2027.
Debian Trixie, now is the time to shine, release soon please.
You can already switch to it though. Why wait?
Maybe he made a typo and meant Debian 13
Yeah, Trixie is Debian 13, that said, Debian 12 is perfectly capable, and Arch is already better on a Gaming PC anyway.
Arch is already better on a Gaming PC anyway.
I may agree because it’s easy to get gaming packages on Arch(i use a arch based distro cachyos with chaotic aur repos)
Not that I’m against doing this, but just so people are aware, running LTSC or IoT is essentially a violation of EULA unless your license of Windows is Enterprise or Education. Home and Pro aren’t valid for this. Yes, there are activation scripts available online, but personally, if Microsoft doesn’t want me to run Windows, it’s their loss, not mine.
Excel is the most important tool I need for my work. :/
IIRC there is browser support for excel
There is web support, but it lacks most actually useful functions. Libreoffice is great, but is not 1:1 compatible with excel. Then there’s Onlyoffice, which is very compatible, but also lacks many functions.
Bottom line is, if you’re an excel power user, you’ll need to learn Libreoffice Calc, or you’re out of luck. If not, Onlyoffice should suffice.
if you’re an excel power user, you’ll need to learn Libreoffice Calc
Let’s be honest…most people who are Excel power users probably need to interact with other users. Sending and receiving documents and templates, etc. Simply learning Calc yourself isn’t going to suffice, you’d have to convince your entire business to switch.
Your logic is spot on, and it does apply to most power users, but not to all.
Everyone has a different use case and experience, I think we speak based on our own experiences.
I believe OnlyOffice may be problematic from an ethical perspective if I remember correctly because of Russia or something. But it’s FOSS, has a linux desktop version, and its compatibility with Excel has been absolutely rock solid for me.
As you said, it’s FOSS, so why would its country of origin cause ethical problems?
I don’t know much about OpenOffice, but virtually all open source apps are developed by specific individuals who ask for donations or get paid for enterprise use. If you just download and use the app quietly, there’s probably no problem, however, if you talk about it to anyone, you’re promoting it and that may lead to others donating, generating more visibility, leading to more contracts, and so on.
Yes, but it’s considerably slower and extremely frustrating to use for a power user.
Not FOSS but maybe this might work for you: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
Interesting! Thanks.
No problem! FOSS alternatives are really good as an office suite on their own but when it comes to Excel, things might go tricky. I hope they’re as compatible as they claim.
I’m seriously considering trying to become a contributor.
Well, they appreciate any kind of contributions. Thanks for considering this.
Or run it on Win10 VM. I don’t think MS will drop support for Office apps on Win10 for some time at least.
Definitely another option.
It’ll probably work for a good decade or two before it goes out of date. They still need to support the enterprise LTS version, which I think includes excel.
It’s pretty bad at anything with large amounts of both data and formulas.
As an example, if you try to make a spreadsheet for managing resources of any basic Colony Sim game (something with a list of items and recipes to turn them into other items and keep track of quantities), then you’re already beyond the computing capacity of the browser based excel.
To be fair, if you’re using large amounts of data and formulas as a power user, you should probably be instead writing some python or something to handle CSVs.
As for your particular example, LibreCalc would work just fine.
Yeah but it sucks and has nowhere near the same level of festurs
Librecalc isn’t that great and has some compatibility issues. Excel is the industry standard.
What exactly are you doing on Excel that Calc does significantly worse?
Graphs.
Both softwares have graphs. You’ll need to be more specific than that, to help us understand.
Yes, the graphs I make are extremely specific and their look and feel is very relevant. The possibilities for graph customization on both google sheets and libreoffice are both more limited.
Excel is proprietary software made by a company that achieved monopoly status by intentionally designing “compatibility issues” into its products. If you’re telling me you have a business need to use the Microsoft Windows desktop version of Excel specifically and nothing else will do, then throw your PC in the garbage and pay whatever tithe Microsoft tells you to pay. Or more specifically, have your employer do that if it’s their decision anyway.
Thanks for your useful advice.
happy to help
I’m so used to libreoffice that I don’t understand excel that well anymore. But there was a pretty steep learning curve to get there, months.
I use it too and it’s fully sufficient for my amateur tasks (functions to calculate things, conditional highlighting, etc), but the people who say there may be compatibility issues have a point. I remember files saved in the MS apps or vice versa not having the same like breaks, margins, or whatever it was that caused some content to not be on the same page as on the origin system.
Yeah, for MSO compatibility, OnlyOffice is a much better option, with some caveats.
LibreOffice?
LibreOffice is good as a standalone software, if you’re not looking for MS Office compability. I use LibreOffice, and my sister suddenly ask me to help edit their MS Office document. It was nightmare. There are a lot of hidden gotchas that rarely reported. It’s absolutely not recommended to constantly changing software if you’re editing your document.
Also, at the moment, Excel has more advance feature than LibreOffice Calc.
did you try running excel on wine?
I have not and I’ve heard it works, but it seems to defeat the purpose of switching. :(
it doesn’t.
you’re free from Windows and you can still use Excel which is necessary for your work.
Look, what everyone is saying here, including me, are suggestions. Feel free to listen to some people and not some people.
LibreOffice has LibreCalc. It’s free and there’s a Windows version you can try.
What does it mean in practice for windows 10 to reach end of life? There are no more security updates? My vm will stop working? They are preventing you from using your computer?
No more security updates, so it will gradually become unsafe to use online.
I still think they’re going to push the date back.
I kept my Win7 install until like 2023 and it wasn’t security that drove me away but a huge amount of software no longer working on it.
no more security updates
I’ve been dry-running a Linux only world for a few months now, dual booting and running everything on the Linux partition, only using windows when necessary. So far basically all my games run well under proton and the few non-free programs I care about work well enough under wine. I think tomorrow is the day I blow away the windows partition.
Same here. Games and general office tasks work flawlessly on Linux. I currently only launch into windows for the Adobe suite and some other image editing apps (by Topaz Labs) that I already have licenses for but that won’t run on Linux.
So far the alternatives I’ve found aren’t nearly as powerful. However I’m determined to uninstall windows by the time my licenses run out 9 or so months from now.
So far I think I can live without Topaz, Photoshop and some other image stuff long term, but to be honest if that turns out to be wrong, I’m inclined to buy a cheap Mac Mini specifically for photo stuff rather than keep Windows around anymore.
Hm. That’s worth considering, yeah. But I want to get away from Adobe. I dislike just about every single change they made to any of their programs in the last 5 years… And any change their made to their business model in the last 15 years or so.
I’ve been on Linux for 10 months or so, but I still have Windows installed on a separate disk. I guess if I needed the space I’d worry about deleting it, but I’m good for now. I have booted into Windows only a handful of times over those 10 months, and the stretches get longer and longer.
If anyone is interested to try out Linux distros, you can do it in your web browser at https://distrosea.com/
The only thing keeping me on Windows is Teamcraft for FFXIV. It has packet capturing on Windows, but not on Linux because of the way they’re doing packet capturing. There have been people who claim to get it working, but it’s still not 100%. I could even use plugins to get ACT (DPS meter) working, but sadly no plugins for Teamcraft…
That’s interesting because pcapping is definitely not some windows exclusive feature, and the means are pretty transferable. I wonder what the hold up is.
Yea, that’s very weird. It’s open source so anyone could make changes to it, but still.
use wine or proton
The game uses wine, but the packet capturing just doesn’t work.
I worked on this myself: there’s no way to get it working no matter what anyone says they managed to get working
You can force team craft to run on the same wine prefix (XIV launcher makes that ezpz) and everything fancy related to that and it just doesn’t work
VM+GPU pass through
Don’t let this hold you back.
Legitimately it’s this and COD that keep Win10 LTSC on one of my drives it’s that useful for the game
What do you use it for?
My main game: final fantasy XIV. It takes packets so I don’t have to put in the items I have each time when I want to craft and lets me know what inventory they’re in.
Can I bother anyone in this thread to help with suggestions for a Linux distro that works for a gaming PC that won’t require me to have a computer science degree? I’m not afraid of some troubleshooting here and there, but I’m
kind ofdumb.Edit: I should have known there’d be a shotgun load of different distros, good thing I’ve been gifted with e-“waste” for years, I’ve got some tinkering to do. Hyper-fixation, here I come.
Bazzite is generally the go-to for gaming.
Thank you!
Bazzite is phenomenal. Just know that it works a little differently than what I’d call “legacy” distros. So when googling things, just know that a lot of instructions for Linux won’t work for you.
If you run into trouble, hop on the discord and someone will help you.
Might be helpful to append “fedora” to any searches, as that’s the distro that serves as the base for Bazzite
My journey was: Kubuntu -> Tuxedo OS -> Garuda Linux.
Kubuntu was painful, lots of issues. Maybe just got unlucky, but cannot recommend it.
Tuxedo OS was phenomenal until I bought a GPU. Then stuff broke left and right. I wasn’t able to get Steam to launch anymore so I switched.
Garuda Linux is the one I still use. I had it for 53 days and had no severe issues to date. There’s still a bunch of stuff that needs ironing out, but that’s the case with all Linux distros, it’s never “fire and forget” like Windows, in my experience.
I chose Garuda because it’s advertised as “the Linux for gamers”. It’s packed with extra goodies that make life easier - you can pick and choose popular apps to be installed right away (things like Lutris, Steam, Heroic Launcher, Proton, Vivaldi browser), and you get an application that helps with maintenance.
The only major issue I had was due to my ignorance (but I kind of blame it on the OS because it was supposed to be “noob friendly” and this bit was very much not so) - just after installation and updates you’ll get the system maintenance app ask you to “merge pacdiff files”. This shows up a comparison window of two files, and if you’ve never used Linux you have no clue what’s going on. When you get that, just don’t overwrite the one on the right with the one on the left - you’ll break the entirety of your package manager. :D
Other than that: I’m having a great time. The OS looks pretty, games run great. 9/10
I installed mint on a new laptop recently and it was completely painless. To be fair I’ve used Linux before but it’s been over a decade and I didn’t have any major hiccups. I installed steam and was playing games within 15 minutes of finishing the install. The UI is very familiar and comfortable for windows users and the entire ux seems to be designed around not making you use the terminal unless you have to. I highly recommend trying it out.
I’d say anything mainstream and not esoteric should do the trick. I’m talking Ubuntu, PopOS and so on.
My partner is currently running PopOS. They somehow managed to combine the chronically outdated Ubuntu packages with a rather counterintuitive UI.
Updates frequently fail, commonly used packages like gamescope aren’t available, overall wouldn’t recommend.oh… never actually tried it myself. welp too bad, it seemed like a fair distro to check out. nvm…
I’m on PopOS and my experience is the exact opposite. I love the UI- it’s the main thing I like about it actually. Never had an update fail.
Don’t use gamescope, just run everything from Steam or Heroic and never had an issue gaming.
YMMV
Yes, most times gamescope isn’t required. Thing is, sometimes it is and not having the option is an inconvenience in the best case and makes games unplayable in the worst case.
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Maybe Q4OS, but if you a Gamer, which want to play the most recent games (logically in a Gaming PC), Linux sadly isn’t the best option, the most modern games are Windows only, the advantages of Linux are others. In this case the best option is to use Linux in dual boot with Windows. I hope that it change in the future.
Why 2010, is it cause of 64bit processors?
I assume it was a generalization, just few weeks ago I installed 32-bit Linux Mint to two laptops from 2007 or 2008, now my kids have their very own and fully functional computers. They do lag a bit sometimes, but learning patience is just good for the kids.
I believe it’s TMP 2.0 support
10 still has over 50% market share (source)
Is there some easy way to find devices that don’t support win 11 on ebay? Hoping for cheap laptops for surfing.
sort by cpu model or filter by no os. windows has a list of unsupported cpu models, but the vast majority of stuff getting dumped on eBay is corporate salvage. an older Thinkpad or used G3 workstation is (65 - 80$). 20$ SSD and you should be good to go. if you’re in a pinch for cash, an old monitor and thin client can be under 60$, m+k under 10$.
Well, my niece and nephew do need a minecraft machine… 🤔
Came to Lemmy while my disk manager is processing my new partition.
If it goes well, I’m switching today.
So, probably some time early tomorrow morning. Because I’m not great with reading instructions.
Edit: it’s still processing. It feels like it shouldn’t take this long to partition…
if you are shrinking or modifying an existing partition to make room, it will take quite a while
I am so ready to abandon Windows on my laptop. The only software I need that doesn’t run on Linux or have an equivalent Linux option is Serato DJ Pro. Literally the only thing keeping Windows in the house.
I’m stuck on Fusion 360. So annoying to have that one doorstop from freedom.
