Windows 10 downgrade

When I started using Linux I did not know how successful a changeover to it could be. I set up a new computer at the beginning of this year to have Windows 10 on and deemed it worthwhile to have a PC in a space wasting tower case with new hardware to run Windows 10 on because I expected to keep using Windows 10 a lot.

Now it's nearly a year later and I hardly use Windows 10 at all. The most I need to use it for is printing, scanning and downloading photos from my cameras and using IrfanView to edit the camera's images. This is not something I will even turn the computer on once a week for these days. Until very recently I thought I would still need it for graphics editing but having learned Gimp on my Debian desktop in the last month I won't need to use Paint.net at all. I still have some documents I edit in Word but that doesn't need much resources. 

So as I have an old slow AMD E350 mini-ITX in a small chassis available I have decided this will be my Windows 10 computer, and the Home edition (which I am buying a license for) will serve just fine for this purpose. Even though everyone knows MS just forces updates to Windows 10 on you at the drop of a hat, the testing on this older computer shows it will run 10 and the display will work well. I don't need much hardware support for it except for the screen and USB ports, and with the screen I have connected to, the default Windows drivers work well enough. It has 8 USB ports which should be enough as the screen it connects to has another 4 port hub on it. The tower has had a lot of extra USB ports added by me (I think there are 4-6 on the back of the motherboard and a USB 4 port card and a couple of 2 port brackets to connect to the motherboard connectors as well as the two on the front panel and a 2 port USB hub on the monitor) and I don't expect to have such a need of these ports as has been the case when it was used with Windows. There were three or four camera/phone USB cables connected and I don't know if I will keep these all plugged in at once as I have with the tower which is less accessible.

This means I can reclaim that nearly new tower computer for Debian and that's what I working on at the moment. I should get the Windows 10 license I have ordered in a day or two and then I can start setting up the E350 on Windows 10 with the stuff it needs. The tower is going to be a lot better running Debian 10 with a lot of stuff because it has an Intel graphics chipset instead of an older Radeon chipset that there aren't any drivers for any more (either in Windows or Linux) that redraws the screen really slowly. The tower also has room to add more disks in future (it already has two inside) and a removable drive bay like all my computers. There won't be much in the way of local resources on it but should I get into audio recording with some of the great software available on Linux it is possible that it could be used that way. I am planning to evaluate Ardour and a couple of other serious audio packages on it just to see how good they are, as well as Qgis. Mostly it will be testing Debian 10 which is a development release.

More Debian

Since last writing the remaining Linux computers in the house have been changed over to Debian. As usual this has been a straightforward procedure, in the case of mediapc reconnecting the RAID array being as simple as it was on mainpc. All computers use XFCE as their desktop environment.

There are now four computers in this household running Linux and one running Windows 10. The possibility is that the Windows 10 computer will be changed to the lowest spec one due to the fact I use Windows quite rarely and struggle to see the rationale in having a computer sitting there not being used a lot of the time. However the case for the fourth Linux computer isn't that great either so of the four computers on this desk, at present the lowest spec one is running Linux and the 3rd lowest runs Windows. The other issue with switching computers is ensuring there are enough USB ports as there are quite a few camera cables and other devices plugged into the Windows computer such as the printer and scanner.

Due to now having a fourth computer at my desk (a small form factor that used to be playing videos in my bedroom) it is using its VESA bracket to mount on one of the monitor support posts at the side of the desk and has its own keyboard and mouse plus the KVM to share the main keyboard/mouse. It has one display of its own plus sharing a display with the mediapc. At least this lets me make reasonable use of it to do some actual work on.

Debian 10 is a test installation as this is a development version of the software but it will run Qgis development edition and I am using this where I can and may install additional applications to see if I can test out this version of Debian reasonably well. I may have a look at a good audio editor if ones exist to see how well it would work on the platform.

The bedroom PC is hopefully getting replaced with another low-end system but using better supported hardware (Intel chipset) that can play videos because this has been an issue with the AMD E350 board (the same board also in the 4th computer on my desk). Since AMD has dropped support for the Radeon chipset on these boards in Linux as well as Windows, these computers now struggles to play even Youtube videos full screen. I could put an older version of Debian or Ubuntu on it and regain that performance but replacing the computer with one using Intel chipsets is the preferred scenario. 

Best open source software

Here's my picks:

• Debian GNU/Linux. One of the oldest distros around and definitely among the best, many others are derived from it. First released 24 years ago. I now use Debian on my desktops daily, generally with XFCE desktop environment.
  
• Xubuntu Linux. After trying a few variants of Linux and Ubuntu this was the one I used the most until recently and is still very well worthwhile. It is basically Ubuntu with XFCE as the desktop environment and compared to Cinnamon that runs on Linux Mint, it is very economical on system resources, you will appreciate this whether you run low end or high end hardware.
  
• Qgis. A great GIS package and a great FOSS package. I've been using it since 1.8 (the current stable release is 2.18 but there is a 3.0 due early next year) and have frequently used the development masters for day to day work on my maps project.
  
• Gimp. A brilliant graphics package every bit as good as Photoshop, yet completely free and open source. A well deserved reputation earned as a piece of high quality and well supported software.
  
• Inkscape. The other piece of high quality graphics software, whereas GIMP works with rasters, Inkscape works with vectors. It can open one of my maps produced in a PDF file and edit every element in the map easily. I haven't yet had occasion to use Inkscape in a production environment but it is standing by for any time in the future that I might have to heavily customise any maps for special purposes.
  
• Firefox Developer Edition. This adds on to the basic functionality of the regular Firefox release. It runs e10s out of the box and also has many tools provided to aid web development. Whilst I don't use these tools much myself, FFDE (formerly Firefox Aurora) is a great general purpose web browser.
  
• Disk Usage Analyser (Baobab). Every so often you can run out of disk space, this package does a great job of analysing disk usage and helping me to keep on top of managing my computer's home drive free space.
  
• LibreOffice. I haven't made much of this other than Writer but the capability looks to be very good. I must spend some time digging more into what you can do with this software suite.
  
• Thunderbird. One of the best email clients ever written, its strength lies in its common heritage with other Mozilla projects, which includes the ability to be customised and added on to with extensions. The calendar which can work with Google Calendar is an example of this.
  
• Youtube-dl. If you have ever installed some dodgy "youtube downloader" only to find your PC was taken over by spyware, you'll appreciate this great command line package. Very easy to use, it is also hugely customisable with dozens of switches and settings.
  
• Kodi. I have a couple of my computers running this software in use every day for playing video clips, ripped DVDs and extracted CD tracks etc. It is designed to be used with a multimedia keyboard and has a wide range of plugins and extensions available.
  
• Simple Screen Recorder. A great and easy to use package for capturing your screens. Does not have any technical limitations or put any watermarks into your video clips.
  
• Bluefish Editor. A great text editor, I mainly use it to hand code the HTML on my web site. It has all the usual stuff like syntax highlighting, code completion, colour coding etc etc.