WIN 10 End of Life 10/14/2025 - anyone moving to Linux?

slmjim+Z1BEBE wrote:

My oldest PC is one I built circa 2007 & is creaking along on WIN 10 painfully slowly when running that HDD. 

 

I discovered not long ago that old machines running new Windows can be completely hobbled by a slow spinning hard drive alone.
In 2021 my mom's computer from 2013 was unusable.  It took minutes to boot, and what seemed like minutes just to load the browser.  I bought her a brand new Dell and was shocked when setting it up that the new computer was also nearly useless.  It also had a spinning disk hard drive.  I ended up replacing the drives in both computers with solid state drives, and now the one from 2013 runs great.  It boots super fast, the browsers runs great.  There was no need to upgrade at all (but it still doesn't support Win11).
As for the 2021 model, I couldn't believe that Dell would sell a computer that preformed so poorly right out of the box.  I guess they figured maybe no one would actually order the spinning drive option?  Like it was just there so they could add an upcharge for the SSD?
 

DOHC wrote:

Why the focus on lightweight distros?  How old is the hardware? 

   Between 10 ~ 17 yrs.  I tend toward Linux Mint w / Xfce desktop for the newer, more powerful machines.

On the other hand, I also discovered recently that modern distros don't run well on a 32-bit machine, even the lightweight ones that claim to have 32-bit support.  It just didn't work.  I have a dual Pentium III machine, 1G of ram, really very fancy for 2002, but none of the 3 or 4 versions that I tried would even run the desktop UI.

   Try AntiX 32 bit.  Based on Debian Stable.  Fast & easy GUI installer,  very fast OS.  Might be surprised...
 

Good Ridin'
slmjim & Z1BEBE

I'll be switching to Linux (probably Debian) with a virtual machine for running CAD software (the only thing that keeps me on windows).

You guys don't want to upgrade to windows 11! I use it on a work computer and it's so slow when it shouldn't be... This is a trend I've seen in recent years; compensating for terrible code with more powerful hardware. Windows XP or 7 was the peak of M$

I have 11 and it's unstable.

Older PCs, particularly laptops that can barely run windows any more, can be made perfectly usable again by installing a Linux distro, in particular Linux Mint if you want a very 'windows like' experience out of the box (but most distros can be massaged to look and act like windows if you really need that - but you'll find, after using Linux for a while, there's really no reason to make it look/work like windows. 

I'm running the latest windows 11 home edition on a Azuzs desktop that I had built in 2023. It runs great and is lightning fast with a hard wired Ethernet connection. I don't use it much except for my 5.1 surround system that it easily supports. I didn't want a new system but my older Win 10 was not compatable with a 11 upgrade ?.   I've had better luck with my phone OS, ( the one I'm typing on now), bought in 2018 and it's still working fine. Still gets app updates but no OS update. If it ain't broke ... 
  My not so smart phone specs.