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
Excel is the most important tool I need for my work. :/
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. :(
Look, what everyone is saying here, including me, are suggestions. Feel free to listen to some people and not some people.
it doesn’t.
you’re free from Windows and you can still use Excel which is necessary for your work.
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.
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.
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
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.
LibreOffice has LibreCalc. It’s free and there’s a Windows version you can try.
IIRC there is browser support for excel
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.
Yeah but it sucks and has nowhere near the same level of festurs
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.
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.
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.
How viable are modern nvidia cards (like 4070) on linux today? Mainly for gaming. I’ve heard there are some driver issues that can cause problems, any truth to this claim?
Most problems with newer cards have been fixed with version 550. Gaming related, the only thing that will cause you pain is VR or Kernel Level AC
Thanks. So just use official Nvidia drivers and I’m good to go? Thinking of moving to fedora if it maters.
I started with Bazzite and moved from there to Garuda. Both have an Nvidia version that just takes care of that for you. I’ve never had to worry about drivers.
I have a 3070 Ti and it works flawless on Mint with the official driver
As someone getting back to pcs and trying linux, it warms my heart because I am scared of VR and shite at online games. This is the place for me.
im not a big fan of linux, mainly cause of multiplayer game and photoshop compatibility, but i would honestly would help out some old folks with a linuxmint install or a free ltsc for few bucks. any way to get on this list?
I’m stuck with Windows for the same reasons. I do use Linux on my laptop though and would not be opposed to switching my office machine to it as well if I can get the company I work for to make a few key software changes. I’ve had older generations of my family running Linux Mint for nearly a decade. They don’t know the difference because it’s all they’ve ever used. I have less phone calls about problem from these people than any Windows users I’ve had to deal with.
What distro would be good for an old (coming up to ten years) Windows 10 under-TV box with a GTX870? Its job is basically to boot straight into big picture mode with no login screen and be operated by a PS4 controller, but I figure I can’t just keep it on Win10 without security patches.
if your using to watch tv try kodi or osmc or another media OS i have a ras pi running osmc and i never had a issue and im sure you could get a ps4 controller to work an if its for games i dont know any maybe bazzite
Oh sorry I edited out the word Steam by mistake.
bazzite or aniother gaming focused like garuda gaming edition would prob be your best bet garuda gaming is arch linux built for gaming and more user friendly
For those which need to use Windows, here three mandatorio FOSS apps (the best IMHO)
- hellzerg Optimizer to eliminate bloat- and spyware
- WindHawk for those which don’t like this terrible childish Fisher Price UI of Windows 11
- Portmaster to monitor and if needed blocking unwanted traffic and telemetries (optional paid SPN service)
With these you can use Windows 11, showing the middlefinger to M$
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.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.
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.
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
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
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.
Linux has gotten incredibly better for gaming. Now Bluetooth controllers connect just as easy as Windows, and Steam has Proton built in so that when you run a Windows only game, Steam will automatically install the appropriate Proton and Wine software – just make sure to turn on compatibility mode in the Steam launcher settings. Every game I ran so far runs fine on Linux.
It couldn’t be a better time to switch to Linux.
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
Luckily it only took like 15 mins total.
Thanks though!
awesome! no worries :)
The other nice thing about Linux is that there are several Live versions you can try out on your computer without making any changes to your Windows installation.
This also lets you see if check and see if Linux fully supports your hardware (just in case you have a weird network or audio card). If the Live version of Linux works, the installed version will, as well.
Most installers let you set up a dual boot on the same hard drive, too.
I love this. I recently set up a “Linux flight” with various distros on a bunch of thumb drives to test drive the latest. I decided to stay Kubuntu but it made experimenting so quick and easy.
I have some friends and family that cant upgrade from Windows 10, so I’m going to keep the flight and walk them through trying out some personally selected distros.
Using Steam, Heroic, and Bottles you can even run Windows software almost perfectly, too. There’s never been a better time for regular folks to make the switch.
There are tools for enabling one to save a bunch of ISOs on a single USB thumb drive so that you don’t need a whole fleet of thumb drives. One such tool is called Ventoy, and there’s another one out there, although its name escapes me atm.
Even if your audio or WiFi card doesn’t work automatically in the live environment, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are out of luck either. My WiFi card manufacturer doesn’t support Linux (Last thing I buy from them), but I was able to find a driver that was built by the community for a very similar product that works flawlessly.
This may be more complex than some people are willing/able to solve, just wanted to put that out there for people who can so they aren’t discouraged by a bad experience with a live distro.
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.
I just toss it in a lake so the fish can have internet.
Coral habitat
Ain’t no coral in lakes!
Technicalities
Corel draw joke in there somewhere
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$, m+k under 10$.
You can still install a 32 bit distro on your pc but it’s not that common (For example: LMDE)
If anyone is interested to try out Linux distros, you can do it in your web browser at https://distrosea.com/
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.
Have you checked out Mixxx? I haven’t used either of them myself, but I’ve read some people say that Mixxx is good and that it was patterned mainly after Serato.
10 still has over 50% market share (source)
