Seriously consider moving to Linux

[balloonshark]

Thank you both for your helpful suggestions. Your suggestions are lining up with my hasty research. I think I'm going go with the i5-4670 - HD7950 setup. My non-techie niece and her 3 children under 7 years old may end up with this PC.

Fallen Kell: What are your thoughts on Zorin OS and Mint versus PopOS for this older system? I'm kind of leaning toward Bazzite because it seems reliable and simple.

 

[WelshBloke]

Thank you both for your helpful suggestions. Your suggestions are lining up with my hasty research. I think I'm going go with the i5-4670 - HD7950 setup. My non-techie niece and her 3 children under 7 years old may end up with this PC.

Fallen Kell: What are your thoughts on Zorin OS and Mint versus PopOS for this older system? I'm kind of leaning toward Bazzite because it seems reliable and simple.

Depending on how old things are Mint is always a safe bet. Zorin looks nicer and it's very much "Windows but not" so that works for a straight swap.

 

[misuspita]

I installed Zorin on one of the laptops and it's great, very windowsy and easy to work with. I'll try Bazzite next on the kid's PC, but I am rather not having time or mood to do it so I crawl with Win11 on the others until I find both 🙂

 

[mikeymikec]

Besides Ubuntu's UI, isn't pretty much every Linux distro "very Windowsy" in look and feel?

 

[misuspita]

I don't know, I haven't tried anything else now, only Mint around 2 years ago, but I think Mint wasn't as smooth of a change, Zorin I only had to search for how to make the Start button work the same as in W land and I did it in 2 minutes, everything else was pretty intuitive. The laptop is a newish one, a AMD 8845 OLED Lenovo Yoga, all drivers were instantly recognized, even the touchscreen, a better experience than in Windows

 

[lxskllr]

Besides Ubuntu's UI, isn't pretty much every Linux distro "very Windowsy" in look and feel?

I think zorin aims to be a sort of clone of windows, where it *very much* looks like windows. I have mixed feelings on that. First is there's better desktops than windows, while still keeping the "classic" paradigm. Second, is I think it's geared towards linux "n00bs", with the idea that keeping in familiar territory will make it easier.

The first is a matter of taste. People like what they like. The second is where I have the most problem. People that know little will be geared up to expect windows and windows behavior, but no matter what skin you put on it, *nix will never be windows. It can lead to frustration and the feeling you got the 'dollar store' windows where nothing works quite right. Something different enforces the idea that you're using something different, and knowledge will have to be gained, and behavior adjusted to the new o/s.

 

[mikeymikec]

The second is where I have the most problem. People that know little will be geared up to expect windows and windows behavior, but no matter what skin you put on it, *nix will never be windows. It can lead to frustration and the feeling you got the 'dollar store' windows where nothing works quite right. Something different enforces the idea that you're using something different, and knowledge will have to be gained, and behavior adjusted to the new o/s.

Absolutely.

I took one look at Zorin recently and I knew that a tonne of my customers would say "not Windowsy enough". If you're wanting to change away from Windows then pretty much by definition you want something different... not that there's any realistic expectation of Windows "staying the same" these days, especially with the idiotic new Start menu that's been rolled out to maybe a quarter of Win11 PCs that is even less customisable than its predecessors.

 

[EXCellR8]

I've got Zorin OS on a less powerful ASUS notebook and I don't mind it. Supposedly much lighter than Ubuntu and aesthetically it's a no-frills desktop UI. Normally I'd install Xubuntu as my go-to, but wanted to give Zorin a whirl. It's fine...

I am also still gaming with Bazzite on the one spare PC, which seems to be holding up pretty well. It doesn't have the grunt to run anything too demanding, but it's fantastic for the backlog or replay of favorites via Steam. I was recently playing Metro LL Redux on there, and there were only a few segments where the framerate dropped a bit. Otherwise, great experience. I'm not the biggest KDE Plasma fan, but it's grown on me some.

 

[misuspita]

These days with the help of chat bots is easier to find out stuff that would have taken a lot of trial and fuckups 10 years ago... I like that zorin tries to keep things as close as possible to windows to attract immigrants, but then, after you're ok with stuff, can venture to try other less Windowsy stuff.

I mean, people are too entranched, android world, apple world, windows world, etc...

 

[WelshBloke]

You can change the way Zorin looks with a couple of mouse clicks. So start off with Windows if you like them you can change it up to a more Gnome centric look.

That's pretty much what I did. After I got rid of the windows like start menu and had the gnome overview window it became a lot more comfortable.

Tbh for most people the OS is just an app launcher. If there's a desktop with icons on they can click on they'll be happy as long as everything else works.

 

[manly]

I've been putting it off for eons, but finally upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (from 22.04).
The upgrader failed at the very end, ominously giving up.

>> Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a)

The dist-upgrade logs were not helpful, but I decided that the upgrade was successful regardless. Worst case, I could do some kind of reinstall. Luckily, it rebooted normally and the only thing currently broken is audio. Some weird bug that surfaced a few years back.

Fixing No Sound (Dummy Output) Issue in Ubuntu 24.04

After updating my Ubuntu to version 24.04, my desktop PC (Gigabyte H510M-K DDR4) can't detect audio drivers. Headphones work, but external speakers are not recognized. ~$ aplay -l **** List of PLAY...

askubuntu.com

2026-03-09 15:29:05,374 ERROR Exception during pm.DoInstall()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-3gtmg4ew/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py", line 220, in run
res = pm.do_install(self.writefd)
apt_pkg.Error: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR SystemError from cache.commit(): installArchives() failed
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR found exception: 'E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,877 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,889 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (g-io-error-quark: Failed to execute child process “./xorg_fix_proprietary.py”: Failed to execve: No such file or directory (1))
2026-03-09 15:31:19,890 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: '/usr/lib/ubuntu-advantage/convert_list_to_deb822.py'

 

[Zepp]

I've been putting it off for eons, but finally upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (from 22.04).
The upgrader failed at the very end, ominously giving up.



The dist-upgrade logs were not helpful, but I decided that the upgrade was successful regardless. Worst case, I could do some kind of reinstall. Luckily, it rebooted normally and the only thing currently broken is audio. Some weird bug that surfaced a few years back.

Fixing No Sound (Dummy Output) Issue in Ubuntu 24.04

After updating my Ubuntu to version 24.04, my desktop PC (Gigabyte H510M-K DDR4) can't detect audio drivers. Headphones work, but external speakers are not recognized. ~$ aplay -l **** List of PLAY...

askubuntu.com

2026-03-09 15:29:05,374 ERROR Exception during pm.DoInstall()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-3gtmg4ew/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py", line 220, in run
res = pm.do_install(self.writefd)
apt_pkg.Error: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR SystemError from cache.commit(): installArchives() failed
2026-03-09 15:29:05,404 ERROR found exception: 'E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,877 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2026-03-09 15:31:19,889 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (g-io-error-quark: Failed to execute child process “./xorg_fix_proprietary.py”: Failed to execve: No such file or directory (1))
2026-03-09 15:31:19,890 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: '/usr/lib/ubuntu-advantage/convert_list_to_deb822.py'

out of curiosity I pasted this to chatgpt and it said it looks like a package failed to configure or install properly during the upgrade, it suggested repair broken packages and fix dependencies

might be a relatively simple fix