Alternative OS and their uses?

I am posting this here instead of looking it up to get a feel for what is popular and highly rated.

I recently built a desktop with a 5950x, 3090, waterloop, bunch of nvme, ect.

My question is what alternatives for OS. I hear people using Linux and running windows as a VM. But why? What are the benefits? Cons? There has to be something I’m missing here. I’ve always hard that you don’t want to run a VM unless you have to. Is this correct?

What alternative OS are there and what are their best uses? Maybe for this build, but for other builds as well. I plan to build a server and a TR workstation in the not so distant future. I would like to get an idea of what to start researching now.

Popularity is about the most atrocious metric imaginable. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it good or valuable. All that is needed for something to be popular is for it to be ‘cheap and easy’. If you set the bar that low then you are not going to improve as a human being.

My advice would be to pick any Unix-like operating system with a shell and learn to live on the command line in a text-only interface. You’ll be amazed at how much you learn about how computers really work by doing so, and that knowledge will let you make better decisions moving forward.

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Popular in the general public but I didn’t ask the general public. I asked level 1 tech forums. Which automatically comes with the assumption that the people that frequent these forms aren’t looking for cheap and easy.

While I don’t doubt the merits of your advice. I would want to go in with some type of objective in mind, other than to learn. I’ll look into it.

Mostly

  • potentially better security
  • less money - some are free and you can run as many copies as you like
  • different UI - maybe you don’t like windows. i HATE the fact that a background running application will pop to the front if it needs attention for example and get in the way of whatever i may have been doing. if i was typing, maybe even the dialog box will be OK’d/Cancelled depending on what i was typing at the time. This is the biggest hatred i have for windows as a daily driver - and why i run macos for most stuff to be honest
  • most of them are unix based which has different design decisions which some prefer
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The most important reason to choose a different OS is the freedom of choice. Mac-OS/iOS and Win-OS OOTB install a sh!tload of apps ‘phoning home’ constantly to inform their masters of whatever you’re doing on your hardware.

Linux and BSD don’t. At least, they ask before doing so if at all and actually respect your choice if you don’t want that. As alluded to already, Linux and most BSD’s are free: no costs, no curtailing of users, no limits on how much hardware you can install it on and of course: free to configure it the way you want. But that doesn’t mean it’s “free Windows”, it isn’t. Well, it isn’t Windows :stuck_out_tongue: Linux and BSD live in a different environment and do things differently to Win-OS/iOS/Mac-OS. That takes a bit of getting used to on the part of the end-user as well as the sysadmin. The word you’re looking for is different, not difficult :wink:

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That’s me (and thousands others).
I always wanted an alternative to Windows, but since I am gaming, Linux wasn’t an option.
That, was in the past. With Lutris, Proton and Windows VMs, this it the best practice today.
Linux is by far a better OS, but needs more knowledge to make it they way you like it and you can because it is fully customizable. My desktop looks like OSX.

The decision to switch to Linux as a main OS came when W10, after the 1903 update, killed most of my “no-spy” settings/apps and also couldn’t handle a simple setting, that ALL the previous versions did (and W8, W7, WXP, W2000, …). What is that? I am Greek, I learned to use US keyboard layout and I live in Ireland… No, W10 don’t like that. As soon as I set my region to Ireland, I have the IE keyboard layout added on top of US and GR. If I try to remove it, my region goes back to US… This changed on that certain version, don’t know why, and even though multiple people have reported it, they still keep it.

This was the last bit that made me say f*, I am switching. After couple of months Distro hopping, I ended up with Manjaro mostly because of AUR, a repo that Arch/Manjaro users re-pack certain apps from other distros to make them available. Therefore, I have all the apps that I need.

Now I play all the available games in Linux and for those that don’t work, I am using a Windows VM, where the only personal information I have is an email that I use to login in certain game launchers (Steam, Origin, etc). And of course, no keyboard layouts :wink:

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I got tired of settings going to whatever MS fancies as default for that particular ptch release. As time goes by, I no longer feel like i have control of what happens to my win10 machine, hence my move to to Linux. I tried a lot of the more popular distros and finally landed on Manjaro GNOME. I feel like i am in control and in command of my PC in Linux.

Steam Proton is so easy with games. I do miss online competitive multiplayer games sometimes and I cant run them on Linux because of games refusing to support Linux.

There are also bonus to privacy and less risk of malware by using open source apps

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Mostly it is about security, privacy, and system control. There are less viruses for Linux than Windows. This is mostly because there are less users. Viruses for Linux do exist, but the way Linux handles access for programs does make it harder to get “root” access to control everything on a system just by installing software. The software repositories used by Linux are generally safer than just downloading an executable off a random website (you can still do that in Linux if absolutely necessary). You still need to take general good computing practices like not clicking links or attached files you don’t trust or haven’t verified.

If you have ever tried to change something in WIndows and were told no by the system you own, then you have begun to see the need for system control. In Windows you have to go through the trouble of setting up administrator privileges for the system you own. Linux sets this up for you on installation. You add a super user password and this allows you to make “root” or lower level changes to you system. If you tell Linux you want to delete a file using the sudo (super user do) command it will do it (whether you should or not might be a different matter). Using sudo only unlocks root for a short time. You don’t have to remember to reenable it (unless you have set the terminal to always run as root (don’t do that)). This is part of the security that makes Linux more secure to outside programs. It also keeps other people from installing things on your PC without your permission. ie. Children just clicking on something and telling it to install.

If you are a gamer proton from Steam can make running Windows games pretty easy. There are some games that don’t run well. Mostly multiplayer games with DRM. ie. Fortnite, Call of Duty, etc You can check how the games you like to play work here: https://www.protondb.com/ Also check about multiplayer online games with VMs too. Some online games have been known to ban players running in a VM.

I’m currently running Pop OS on my laptop for work. I have a lot of down time between calls and like to play games. I mostly play single player, so Linux has been working fine for me. My son plays multiplayer games, so I’m still running Windows 10 on my desktop. The other day on startup Windows decided to hold my system hostage while it ask if I really didn’t want to make Edge my default browser, I was really sure I didn’t want to enable all the user tracking “features” I told it to turn off on installation, and if I was sure I didn’t want to link my cell phone to my PC. Most of the options presented weren’t just no. it was a choice between “Skip for now” and “Remind me later”.

One of the nice things about Linux is it’s free. If you are thinking about using it, just pick a distro, install it, and try it for a week or 2. If it works for you then great. If it doesn’t, you got a chance to learn about something new and then you can just reinstall Windows without it costing you anything (except for the Windows key :slight_smile: ).

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Oh man am I going to sperg post in here later

Aren’t all OSes an alternative to some other OS?
Anyway, assuming we’re making alternative to Windows, isn’t the leading reason these days the simple pain in the arse that windows is now? I remember feeling like I was spending more time waiting for updates to install, and then fixing whatever they broke than actually using the computer… To the point I had written a script to fix a load of settings major updates broke every 6 months, and keeping registry files of other random stuff that got changed every few weeks.

Switched to Linux full time, and 99% of those frustrations are gone. Yes, it still breaks on some updates or needs to reboot to finish installing some updates… But its all far less often than Windows 10.

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Outside of Windows, in the Linux world Ubuntu is quite popular and polished. There’s also Mint and PopOS that give you a Windows like polished feel if you want alternatives.

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The Lutris creator describes what’s the deal with a lot of Linux users fairly well in my opinion: In one way or another, we have been burned by Windows or Mac. It could be an update that just fucked up, it could be that our version of Windows is no longer supported (Win 7) but the newest version isn’t what we want, it could be that it’s preventing us from doing what we want or just have some weird stuff that just negatively impacted our experience enough that we actually consider another OS. Or maybe it’s some ideological stuff like freedom from surveillance, closed-source system that we don’t know what exactly it’s doing, or don’t want to support Microsoft or Apple for the stuff they do. And perhaps some economic issue where we don’t want to pay but we don’t want to pirate either (which can come with its own security issues as well). Usually it’s a mix of all of the above.

Whatever it is, it was enough for us to try another OS, and depending on what you’re using it for and at which point of time we are talking about, found that it fits our usecase without the issues that we didn’t like about Windows or Mac.

Alternatively, for some people it is because of their job. Either they’re already used to the Linux experience from working in server environment or because they use it for programming as UNIX-like OS are better for programming in general from my knowledge. If you’re used to it, then you might want to bring that into your normal non-work use.

If you have watched Linus Tech Tips’ videos on Linux, then you’ll see that in all honesty, Linux is actually more than enough for a lot of people’s use-case. The specific scenarios that currently Linux doesn’t do well are just games with Anti-Cheat (normal games can mostly be run nowadays - see Wine, Proton, Protondb, and Lutris), Adobe software (although there are alternatives that are viable as long as you don’t need that tight workflow integration Adobe has), Game Pass/Microsoft Store, and certain apps that requires specific libraries and subsystems (for me the most notable ones are my local tax app, DMM Game Store, and android emulators). With Wine and Crossover, though, that list shrink further down as I have actually managed to run Office 365 with little issues using Crossover.

This is where running Windows in a VM comes in. Linux does VM very, very well, even at its baseline. So long as you have a system with 8GB of RAM and a Quad-core CPU from the last 10 years, you can comfortably run Windows in the background. Hell, at this moment I am using an old Lenovo G40 with i5-5200u and 8GB DDR3 RAM, and with the right settings I can always keep Windows open in the background even as I’m opening several office documents and Firefox open. I always kept it open in case I need something from Windows specifically because things like Whatsapp and GDrive’s file format detection can be borked on Linux and while I could use Office 365 natively with Crossover, I still prefer to use them in a remote session into my VM using Fmstrat’s Winapps.

There are several reasons to use VM. The obvious one would be that some things are just still aren’t compatible with Linux. The other one is game - on Linux you can allow the VM OS to talk directly to your GPU or other hardware (aka VFIO, passthrough) thus eliminating the primary issue of bad graphical performance on VM. Yet another one is security - if you make a VM dedicated to web-browsing, then you don’t need to care about malware because what’s it going to do? Bork the empty VM or steal non-existent data from the machine?

So in summary: people use Linux because it can fit their usecase for an OS almost, as well, or better than Windows or mac does. It has some limitations still, and that’s where VM comes from, and it’s a valid strategy because Linux does VMs amazingly well.

I am somewhat over-simplifying, but if you wish to really get it, then I would recommend LTT’s videos on the subject, browsing protondb and lutris if you game, and overall just checking out the OS in a live environment (a “try it before you install it” mode where you put the OS in a flashdisk, then boot into it without installing it to get a feel of how the system look and feel). For the last one, I would recommend some a distro (specific variants of Linux/OS) with UI configurator such Zorin OS, Manjaro, and Feren OS that allows you to easily choose between Windows-like, mac-like, or more normal Linux configurations of UI.

Hm, for server you probably want to just use ubuntu and be done with it. It’s the most popular option and honestly the least hassle free if you don’t already know what you want. It has a good amount of packages that are updated comparatively fast when compared to the debian it is based on, and it’s the distro that is most targetted for building stuff on Linux so getting support is more straightforward than in other Linux distributions.

idk what you’re going to do with a TR workstation, but I’d imagine you want something stable? It strongly depends on what you’re going to do with it, but AFAIK debian is a good choice if you want something that… doesn’t update fast but is very stable, Fedora is a good choice if you want all the latest things but with a good amount of polish (and good error handling), plus again ubuntu is always an option. Although I also know that Pop!_OS is pre-configured for some workload better than the other options.

As for other options, there is BSD which… is kinda like Linux but doesn’t use the Linux kernel. As far as I know most of the reason for normal people to use BSD is just preference or ideological reasons, while for enterprise I believe it’s because of the licensing and having a more complete ‘stack’ so to say whereas Linux is kind of a mish-mash of what your distribution chose to put on top of the Linux kernel.

Of course, it has to be noted that Linux isn’t just “one thing” and different distributions/flavor are good for different usecase and flavors. At least out of the box - once you get into the nitty-gritty, then the only meaningful differences outside of appearances, defaults, and the packages that the devs chooses to actively maintain in the native repository for their distribution, are just what ‘grand-daddy’ it’s based on. Debian and Arch are the two main ones, but generally the most meaningful differences between each main branch of Linux is how they manage packages/apps and what stuff do they use to power the OS behind the scene (systemd vs system v what-have-you).

That’s the top OSes but there are other OSes that are much less popular but have that is mainly intended for enthusiasts and memes. Temple OS for example is this weird janky OS made “for Christians” and it’s honestly is just there for memes. ReactOS is primarily an exercise in reverse engineering Windows, and it’s been slow-going but it has contributed a lot to Windows emulation and compatibility of Windows apps on other OSes. There’s HaikuOS which… I honestly don’t know much about other than that it’s a continuation of an older OS.

Oh, and I suppose there are also other distributions of Windows that some people made because apparently Windows 10 was the straw that broke the camel’s back and if Windows 10 is just going to be the bloated and messy OS that it is, some people is just going to take the latest ISO and modify it to fit deal with those issues. The most famous one is Windows 10 Ameliorated but I know there are others.

I hope that answers most of the questions?

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I run Windows 10 Pro as an alternative to MacOS,Linux,Unix,BSD because I play Hunt:Showdown … and I don’t think it runs very well on those other platforms.

I do run FreeBSD’ish on a separate computer in the form of TrueNAS. I run Plex media server and Unifi Controller software in separate IOCage jails and some SMB shares.

Kali Linux is a good example of a use case specific distro. It’s pre-configured for pen testing.

I use Ubuntu on my desktop because I don’t want to spend the money on a Macintosh, but still want native access to terminal for web development.

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Isn’t that for you to decide, though, not this forum?

Currently it sounds like you are saying “Hey guys, I’ve got a cool new system, and I’ve got plans for more cool new systems, what OS should I put on them and why?” That’s backwards. Computers are tools used to solve problems. It’s abnormal to start with a solution and work back towards a problem. You normally start with a problem and work forwards towards a solution.

So, what is the problem you are trying to solve with these systems? Why did you build them? What motivated you to spend thousands of dollars on hardware? If you can answer that, perhaps feedback can be more relevant and useful.

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Here are some Alternatives for Windows 10:

  1. ArtRage- it is perfect for starting out.
  2. Krita – As Good As It Gets