On 27Mar2021, Linux Mint ate Microsoft Windows 10 on Legolas.
Three months on, I conclude beyond any doubt that wiping out Windows was the best decision I ever made.
The second best decision I ever made was to test Linux Mint in Virtual Box five years ago.
The third best decision I ever made was to take ownership of the learning curve that migrating in Windows really entails.
A quick reminder: what’s Microsoft Windows like nowadays?
I still need to use Windows at work. I cannot easily describe how painful it now is to use Windows. So I’ll try to describe it difficultly.
My work machine is a powerful beast, but it exhibits constant latency.
For a keyboard-orientated power user, this means that some keystrokes go walkabouts when other services on the Windows machine go to nuclear war with each other, scrambling to feed their narcissistic self-importance for besieged system resources wholly at the user’s expense. Something on Windows tends to clear the keyboard buffer randomly, resulting in all sorts of either garbage or inactivity.
One drain of system resources is anti-malware software. That Windows is still so badly designed that it needs anti-malware software is offensive enough, but the daily scanning for bogeymen (set by company policy) compounds Windows’ own innate ability to burn – literally – its way through hardware.
Another drain of system resources is the update process. In spite of ad hoc updates for really urgent issues – which are fine – the six-monthly “update” process is a monster that has wiped out hours of working time. When we used to work in offices, that was only bearable by asking somebody else to print loads of paper for you to file it. But when working from home, it’s basically having your primary work tool going on strike for three hours. Unless the update bricks the hardware.
A major drain of system resources seems to be the telemetry. This is spooky and just plain wrong.
Every work day, I switch the work machine on, and I have to let it sit for about five minutes before Windows is ready to receive a login. Once I login, I have to leave it for another fifteen minutes, while Windows pisses around doing all sorts of crap.
The cherry atop the icing is dysfunctionality of the most fundamental component of Windows: Windows Explorer. There are too many keystroke “dead zones” and weird control orders that defy any basic awareness of the user process for file management. Windows’ developers and testers are clearly quarter-witted simpletons with likely learning difficulties and a degree of Aspergic sociopathy about them. For the “dead zones”, the only two solutions are ALT+F4 (to close Windows Explorer) or to use the mouse to activate the part of the window that should be active.
Windows is basically a device of psychological warfare against the user, with a particular sadism meted out to keyboard users, and actual warfare on the hardware.
I’m waiting for the day that Windows will update and thereafter demand my vaccine passport before it allows me to log on. How so very Bill Gates.
What nudged me over the edge to wipe install Linux Mint over Microsoft Windows 10 on Legolas?
In short, a Windows update.
In Feb2021, Microsoft pushed out its next big update. My work machine took it and after a few hours, Windows deigned to return control of my work life back to me. How nice of it. As always, the sluggishness and latency was improved – that is to say, the machine had incrementally perfected the art of insolence, rather than being quicker to use – and the anti-malware scanning took longer and longer to complete, with the system fan approaching warp speed in an attempt to stop the CPU from erupting as a micro-nova.
I decided that this was unacceptable. In Mar2021, I made my final preparations to plan alternative apps in the Linux environment. I found that I could form a strategy for every app. I found that each app had a really good chance of working. I had a mitigation in mind for the major things that could go wrong. On balance, simply installing Linux Mint on top of Windows looked like a good risk to take.
But I came back to the same issue as before: Excel.
How did I resolve the issue of Excel?
From the outset, I only ever wanted one spreadsheet software. It had to be compatible with my years of archive data. I made it my number one requirement before I migrated fully away from Windows.
But in my final planning of the final migration from Windows to Linux Mint, I considered what I would have needed to have done if the migration of Legolas to Linux Mint failed, then the reversion of Legolas back to Windows 10 failed (as happened to laptop Gandalf in Jan2018).
And then I remembered: my licence of Excel was a one-use licence bought from a “second-hand” reseller (taking advantage of the then recent court judgement that upheld a right to re-sell software licences on a secondary market). So if I needed to re-install Windows, I would need to re-buy and re-install Office.
It seems that, since that court judgement, Microsoft had found a workaround, to obliterate the secondary market in software licences, and to turn the screw further by more-or-less forcing users to pay a high price for a broad range of software – much of which I didn’t need – with a near-mandatory user account somewhere in Microsoft’s cloud to slurp all my data.
All of a sudden, it occurred to me that the Excel that I had known for years was no longer available. I was able to use Excel in the way I had done because my use of Excel was apparently legacy. According to Microsoft, either I put all of my data in its cloud, which would be free of cash cost to me, but which wouldn’t work for me (because you can’t link workbooks at all in Office 365), or I pay to download the software in the traditional way, link it to a Microsoft identity and allow Microsoft to slurp my data anyway.
The urgency with which I wanted to scrap Windows factored up tenfold.
I went back to my notes. I had used WPS Office for nearly a year – a full test of its “production” use on live data – and it had maintained my data reliably, albeit with weird formatting issues when re-opened in Excel. I sensed no slurping of data by WPS Office for Beijing. So I knew that – for now, at least – WPS Office would be my reserve spreadsheet package to open my archive of Excel workbooks. So even if WPS Office was slurping data for Beijing, it would be really old data that would unlikely serve the needs of the Chinese Communist Party.
I had also tested LibreOffice and PlanMaker, finding both lacking in basic functional compatibility, namely the prohibition of linking workbooks in functions such as =SUMIF() and =SUMIFS().
So I had two choices, both of which could work, with some adaptations. Neither choice was now allowed to be a show-stopper. I would have to defer finding a permanent solution to the archive; I had to be content with the choices available to me in the immediate-term. The need to flee Microsoft was now paramount.
I did one last test in Legolas in its Windows form. I installed Windows 10 from scratch in a virtual machine. I wanted to test WPS Office for Windows without exposing my data to slurping. On creating the Windows admin account, I found that, once again, Microsoft had added yet another step to dissuade users from installing Windows using only local credentials. Yet more push, push, push to create a bloody Microsoft identity.
That… that… that was the end.
How long did installing Linux Mint take?
The real time burden was ensuring backups of all data extant on Legolas, followed by creating a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint Cinnamon. The backups and their verifications took two days.
The first rehearsal installation was to dig out the old laptop Gandalf and install Linux Mint Cinnamon onto it. This was the first time I had installed Cinnamon anywhere. Gandalf accepted Cinnamon instantly, working as reliably as it had done (prior to Windows 7 destroying itself on Gandalf).
The first rehearsal run of Cinnamon on Legolas was from the bootable USB drive, with a couple of apps to ensure that Cinnamon was compatible with Legolas. The apps included Chromium and Google Earth. The first rehearsal run proved successful.
The first installation of Cinnamon on Legolas, overwriting Windows (yay!!!) (and all my data!!! aaagh!!!) was flawless. It took 10 minutes to re-boot from the USB flash drive, pick the options and start the installation process. It took a further 15 minutes for the installation to complete. After installation, I removed the USB flash drive and booted Legolas into Linux Mint Cinnamon from the hard disk drive. Linux Mint Cinnamon was ready for its first login within 2 minutes.
Wow.
I mean. Just. Wow.
What happened then?
I then set about replicating my experience on Windows, in this case to encrypt the whole hard disk, for which I had planned to use Veracrypt, in the same way I had used Veracrypt in Windows. It turned out that, although Veracrypt full disk encryption is viable in Linux Mint, it has weaknesses, namely that the bootloader can’t work when encryted. The better use case for Veracrypt in Linux is to create encrypted volumes, but these can only deal with user data in the user’s home directory. System data – essential meta data that could still identify a machine or its users to somebody who stole the machine – would be unencrypted, which is not a good risk to take.
The better solution – thanks again to the Linux Mint fora – was to use the encryption… within Linux Mint itself. It turns out, there was an option in the installation process to define partition encryption. I didn’t spot it. And, again, a new lesson to learn: partitions, not drives; another distinction that most Windows users can never need to learn in decades (as I didn’t).
It then took me three more attempts to install Linux Mint Cinnamon on Legolas to enable encryption. The first re-attempt failed (I botched my choices). The second re-attempt installed, but I could not prove that encryption had been achieved. The third re-attempt installed and I proved that encryption had been achieved.
Continuous learning curve?
Having learnt on day one that my strategy for disk encryption was instantly flattened by a superior service native to Linux Mint, I knew that my strategy for each app was going to have to be much more broad minded than I had expected.
But, at this time, the deed was done. I had expelled Microsoft Windows from my home life. There was no going back. It was history. It was over. It was finito.
A brave new world awaited me.
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