In my previous posts I wrote about the MS greed machine that is driving the deployment of Windows 10 and how MS now believes they own the hardware it runs on. I have now taken the first step towards shifting my personal machines onto Linux. These computers are homebuilt and have never had Windows licenses anyway so I would have had to consider buying licenses to make them legal if I had stayed with Windows.
The test computer is the one I built from a Gigabyte GA-E350 mainboard which after being in an old desktop case, I installed into an Antec ISK110 small PC chassis as seen here. That was a year ago and it's hardly been used since. So it makes a great test platform for Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa. I picked Mint because it has this nice green look. Seriously, I picked it because it is based on Ubuntu, and Cinnamon has better ratings than Ubiquity. Apart from MS Office it looks like nearly everything I use will be available but a few killer apps like Irfanview and Cobian Backup could take some time to find replacements for. It's possible I may keep one PC still running Windows or look at running some stuff in a VM as a short term solution until I find useful replacements, it is always tricky changing a platform when some apps are not available on the target, it may be that Iview works under Wine or something. Another is the Google Drive client, which I use to sync data automatically from my PC, and which is not available for Linux at present. There are some third party clients available however which I will take a look at.
So I have installed the Chromium and Opera browsers for testing and Qgis as well, this post is being written in Opera on that computer so the installation and putting stuff in has gone pretty well so far. Thunderbird is installed by default too. The backup is the most pressing issue to resolve because it works across two PCs and the different HDD format will make things tricky if both PCs aren't updated to Linux at the same time. That and some of the other tricky things like the software RAID array and transferring data across from the old disks. I haven't set a timeframe for the switch as it is time dependent but I would much rather switch than keep using Windows with all the rubbish MS has put into Windows 10.
