Before Windows 10 goes EOL, I'm testing three alternative Linux distros to save my 6-year-old laptop from the landfill
As the ship sinks, in which direction should you jump?
The CachyOS installer is beautiful, if a little tricky
I love the CachyOS installer. It feels premium and it is a joy to use. Most of the time. There were a couple of times during the install process where I got a little lost.
The first is when I was asked about which Bootloader I would like to use. Typically I would select Grub, but Systemd-boot was selected by default. Why? I used Grub in the end, but a Windows user would have an issue here.
The second issue was the additional package installer. It was like going into a restaurant and being offered a surprise menu of tasty treats, but with little knowledge as to what they are.
But the installer progressed and I was soon ready to boot CachyOS from a fresh install.
Creating installation media for the tests with Rufus
I remember when installing Linux meant grabbing a load of blank CDs, downloading multiple CD-ROM ISO images and then hoping that none of them were borked during the multi-day download (25 years ago! I am old!). Once, when downloading Mandrake Linux, I had a corrupt ISO image and that lost me a fair few hours!
Now, and for the last decade, we just download the ISO image and write it to one of the many USB sticks that we strewn across our desks. But, if you have never done it before, how do you write an ISO image to a USB stick?
For this you will need some software. Personally, I use Rufus. But I have been known to dabble with Raspberry Pi Imager and Balena Etcher.
Rufus is a simple application that asks us to identify the target USB drive, and the ISO image that we want to write to it. Click Start, answer the questions and you will soon have a USB stick with your chosen Linux OS.
So far I've created a Live USB for CachyOS and I am using that to install the OS on to my Lenovo X390 laptop with 8GB and an Intel Core i5-8265U.
But wait! What is a Live USB?
Remember back to my days downloading ISO images? Those images would boot, but directly into the installer. A bit like Windows 95/98/XP did in the day. You couldn't test anything out before commiting to an install. Live CDs were a hybrid of a bootable test version where we could check that our system worked before clicking on install. Over the years, as ISO images got larger, they needed DVDs and now USB. The Live USB gives us a chance to "try before we buy" and they can also be used to fix a broken system.
Live USBs are a Swiss Army knife for fixing broken computers, retrieving data and yes, for testing out new distros without breaking your hardware.
If you are going to retire it, at least recycle it!
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-windows-10-extended-security-updates-available-using-reward-points/
Windows 11 is still working just fine on my relatively antique (and underpowered as heck) Surface Pro 3 after installing with Rufus.
Unfortunately, some will insist on using an unsupported version of Windows which is very unwise. That's just asking for viruses and spyware and to turn your personal computer into a bot aggregator that harasses all of us especially when these will turn into bot farms and DDOS attacks.
Please do not go the route of unsupported software turned spyware. Please don't play your part in turning your computer into a bot drone.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-on-devices-that-don-t-meet-minimum-system-requirements-0b2dc4a2-5933-4ad4-9c09-ef0a331518f1Now all of us suspect Microsoft will quietly change its tune and also suspect this doesn't include security-type updates, but keep in mind Microsoft did just this last week take the very aggressive stance of removing all drivers from older hardware. It is plausible that Microsoft is playing for keeps here and they will let you go down with the ship.
At the end of the day the official word is the official word. No support means no support. Proceed with caution. Many people may feel happy risking mine and others well being, well, that's really classy of you. Such wonderful Gentlemen and Ladies around here.
But do you put yourself at risk? Don't risk your own bank accounts and other information. That is, quite frankly, stupid.
Lenovo devices supported for upgrade to Windows 11
It might need a Bios update, which you can get here.
Lenovo X390 Bios update
As in you call microsoft and tell them "I have windows 11 on potato Pc please help" they will tell you "we don't support this device with windows 11"
It has nothing to do with the OS not being secure.
There is also a Cinnamon version of Ubuntu if you want official Ubuntu instead of Linux Mint.
Lastly there is also Lubuntu which uses LXQT this UI is closest to old Win9x and is the lightest version of Ubuntu, better suited for quite old PC's.
Zorin is to me is a let down, simply because it claims to be for Windows users but then uses a terrible hacked version of the Gnome interface, Gnome does not behave like Windows at all in any way even if you skin it on the surface to look like it.
Finally KDE and LXQT are both built using the Qt framework, a lot of open source software on Windows also uses Qt so applications with their Linux versions fit together UI wise much better than the GTK Gnome/Cinnamon approach.
The only real downside of the Ubuntu variants is they don't enable Flatpak via Flathub support out of the box but that is easy to change and gives you access to a lot more software.
My laptop is 14 years old with an I3 processor of that era, 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD. It's not used for anything intensive, just email, Web browsing, etc, and it now runs Windows 11 24H2 as fast as it ran Windows 7 and 10. My hardware doesn't provide all the security features of Windows 11, but it IS 100% as secure as it's been for the last 14 years and it's as secure as I need it to be for household use. I see no reason to switch to Linux for computers like this unless one simply wants to play around with Linux and would otherwise trash the older machine.