Hello Loui, Thanks for your message. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Loui Chang" <louipc.ist@gmail.com> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" <talk@gtalug.org> Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 2:24 PM Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP PC;
On Mon 25 Jul 2016 10:47 -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
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I have almost no Linux / Unix experience.
After reading this thread for awhile I feel like I need to be some kind of voice of reason here. I think it would be unwise to replace your main PC by struggling with a new OS, struggling with hardware/build, etc.
My advice: - Get yourself an inexpensive off the shelf Windows 10 computer. Windows 10 isn't really the nightmare that Win 8 was in terms of UI. You should do just fine with it. - Use free and open source software on Windows as much as you can. - Here you can figure out how to export your emails into a free/universal format - If you still feel like trying Linux, then make yourself some Live USB flash drives to play around with. - etc...
It would certainly be a lot less work for me, simply to get an off-the-shelf Windows 10 PC, to replace the existing Windows XP PC. But there would still be a lot of work, considering that there is no transparent upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 10. I do not want to continue to use a Microsoft OS as my primary OS. My concession to Microsoft, is to purchase an OEM-license Windows 7 for installation on the new Linux PC, as a fall-back environment for Windows apps (from the existing Win XP PC or not). The main reasons I want to get away from Microsoft: 1. From what I understand, Microsoft has been known to sneakily automatically "update" a PC to Windows 10 from an earlier version of Windows. Is this true? Regardless, I already loathe Microsoft enough that I have no desire to continue using a MS OS. 2, I have read that Windows 10 gathers usage statistics and delivers them to Microsoft. No thanks !! 3. Linux, being open source, is known to be more secure than a Microsoft OS. Plus, considering that so few desktops run Linux, as compared to Windows, this makes Linux a much less "interesting" target for malware practitioners. * * * * * * Although I have little hands-on Linux experience, I am a "retired" software engineer, with over 30 years independent contract programming experience. I have already confirmed that the critical apps I use on Win XP, have suitable versions / replacements on Linux. Years ago, I did some extensive progamming work on a large insurance company's IBM AIX (flavour of Unix), using the Korn shell. Hooked up that company, to an online securities trading service network, so 3rd. party stockbrokers can sell to their clients, the insurance co's financial products (GICs, annuities). I have plenty of command line experience on Win XP: cmd.exe, MySQL client, PostgreSQL client. Also, I am already doing some work on debian Linux and DragonFlyBSD, on cloud-hosted KVM VMs. So I'm not at all afraid of Linux. In fact I look forward to the stimulating challenge of learning Linux. Finally, I look forward to enjoying a tremendous sense of moral satisfaction, from having refused to bend the knee to the Microsoft monopoly. This will be the last time I pay money to MS (Windows 7 on the new Linux PC, will not be the primary OS, the debian 8 will be the primary OS).