This is part 2 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore several alternatives for the most common programs that the average user is likely to use, along with a few o their pros and cons.

If you watch most of the Linux related videos on Youtube it becomes apparent pretty quickly that most of those videos are aimed at “power users”. That is, they get pretty deeply into the inner workings of the operating system, often using a range of commandline tools to get work done. The average user, particularly the new ones coming from Windows aren’t really interested in those details. They want to know how to get things done. Preferably, using tools that are similar to, and as easy to use, as the one’s they’ve become accustomed to on Windows.

This is part 1 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore the reasons for the move and examine the two main alternatives together with their benefits and challenges.

Its seems that many people are looking to move away from MS Windows. There are at least a couple of reasons for this:

• Windows 10 support has come to end of life. This, together with changes to Windows 11 that essentially renders many computers – even fairly recent ones – useless as they no longer meet the requirements. This alone has caused a lot of folks to look else where.
• A lot of people don’t like the idea that Microsoft now requires that you have a Microsoft account in order to access your computer. This also, of course, means that your files are in the cloud, which is a situation that makes some folks (maybe many?) uncomfortable.

Today I want to take a look at the two primary alternatives to Windows. But, before I do that, I want to point out that I’m looking at what I believe the average user wants and and needs in a computer, not at what the tech nerds consider important. One of the greatest challenges for the average person is making sense of all the gobbledygook that the tech nerds spew. You just want a system that works and lets you get your work done and that’s what I’m aiming to address.

While I still spend quite a lot of time viewing Youtube videos on various topics, including technology, I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of many of those videos. Now, I watch them for two reasons: To learn about new technologies, equipment, software, etc; and, to learn actual skills for using those technologies. That is, I might watch a video to discover the pros and cons of a particular piece of software or hardware. Or, I might watch in order to learn how to do something with one of the technologies I’m already using. So, what’s the problem?

Okay, so in my last post I stated that I didn’t do a lot of distro hopping. And, for the most part that is true. That said, though, I do run a homelab and the whole purpose of that lab is to trial different operating systems, software, etc. In the process of exploring Omarchy and its related technologies (Wayland, Hyprland, etc) I ran across several other intriguing things that I wanted to try out. I’ve played with both Arch Linux (on which Omarchy is based) and NixOS in the past but never really gave either of them a fair shake. So, over the last couple of days I’ve been playing with both. Today I want to talk a little bit about NixOS.

Over the past 25 years I’ve played with a lot of Linux distributions. Many of those distributions have fallen by the wayside as developers shift focus, companies fold or are acquired by other companies, and so on. At the same time, new distributions, by the dozens it seems, have popped up to replace them. While I have always been curious about the various distributions I have increasingly begun to realize that for the most part the differences between them isn’t that great. When you really look at them most of the “new” distributions are simply riffs on other distributions, usually – but not always – Ubuntu.