@ lew247: Your story pretty much mimics my own.  I too have used every version of Windoze from 3.11 for Workgroups, all the way up to W10.  I did TINKER with W11, but when the W10 updates stopped in October last year, I told myself that NOW was the time that I stop procrastinating, and move to Linux, if I ever was going to.

Making the decision to actually do it was the hardest part.
Everything after that has been pretty much trouble free.
Yes, I have had some hiccups, but I expected those, and the solutions were really quite painless.

I'm not even that scared of the terminal anymore.  

So, I jumped ship before the W11 started to sink as it seems to be doing now, and all I can say is that I am so happy I moved when I did.  The number of videos on YouTube and stuff all over various articles all over the web, explaining how to fix things that updates have screwed with, is really quite remarkable - that the updates are causing THIS MANY problems.

I've had the luxuary of just watching from the sidelines, while everyone else on W11, has to battle the constant f-up's that are happening.  I expect MS will get it all settled down in time, but it's caused them A-LOT of bad-press, and A-LOT of people have already jumped ship to RMS Linux.  

Interest in various distros of Linux has skyrocketed in the last few months.  A good chunk of it, were people moving cos of the new W11 requirement to basically trash your perfectly good W10 machine, just to run W11.  LOTS of people were.....how should I say this......"Annoyed" about that, and I've now put quite a lot of those people onto Linux Mint using their old W10 machines, and it runs perfectly.  In fact, often times BETTER, cos most of those machines had at LEAST 8GB of RAM, many had 16GB of RAM(some even had 32GB), and Linux Mint is happy as Larry with all that lovely RAM to work with.  

Rant, rant, rant.....

@ Grogster  I had to smile at "I'm not even that scared of the terminal anymore"

I'm the same, although I'm still very new to Linux and rely a lot on Google, other users and AI to find terminal commands if I Want to do something a little different
Such as having Microisoft's OneDrive on my Linux machine and keeping it sync'd to their servers so I have a local copy on my machine

I'm not renewing my Microsoft365 subscription when it ends later in the year so I need to find a different cloud service to backup my files
That was one thing I did like about Microsoft.

I've thought about making or buying a small NAS and asking someone to have it at their place, but that kinda defeats the reason I want an "off site" storage, if I ever got burgled they could just take the machine and I'm left with no files and no backups

I'd be grateful for any suggestions where I can keep a backup sync'd like Onedrive but cheaper
at least 500GB CHEAP, and obviously secure, not like Microsoft or Google or one of the other mainstream which I don;t class as secure

I like Zorin because they don't release it till the "bugs" have been ironed out and don't allow updates to programs unless they confirm it works without bugs

Can be a pita at times when you want the latest but it won't let you because its not been added yet for security reasons, Options:
1 wait till the approve it
2 add it manually via Terminal which I do
Edited 2026-02-01 19:28 by lew247

On the subject of backups there is one, and only one, very important question that you must ask yourself: "What is the total cost to my life and/or livelihood if I have a major data loss, all gone and with no backups?" This puts the situation into perspective as, unless you are running some sort of business, it's unlikely that the amount is much greater than zero. Yes, it's inconvenient to lose stuff. Yes, some of it is of great sentimental value and may be irreplaceable, but how *important* is it really? People lose a lot more than some data every day.

Unless you can put a decent level of importance on the data is there a case for backing it up "just in case it's ever needed" at all?

Off-site cloud storage is always expensive and limited in space. It's on someone else's servers too. Have you ever met them? Would you trust them? Local backups are (arguably) less secure but much cheaper. Two mirrored HDDs of so-called "essential" stuff stored by two different friends is virtually 100% secure, even if it needs a visit to retrieve them. Use HDD encryption if you like and restore using a simple copy from the encrypted drive. Ok, it's not synched but is that the end of the world?

  lew247 said  

Windows 11 I had working for over a year, no real problems, it did what was needed
What I didn't like was how "slow" it could be and the constant updates and nag screens and the Constant adverts

I have to say, I'm not seeing this on a 7-year-old i7 Win11 laptop (used, but with 48GB memory), 20 programs running, dozens of text files open, 3 browsers with 3 instances each with several dozen sites open. With Win10, there were more updates than I liked, but they've seemed barely noticeable with Win11. And I'd say, "what ads; what nagging?".

I did follow somebody's "de-bloating" recommendations when I set it up about a year ago. I hardly ever do Google (or actually Duckduckgo) searches any more--I'm more likely to use AI or search for "how-to" on Youtube (where there are ads, but wouldn't there be as many with Linux?). I don't sign on with a Microsoft login. A couple of weeks ago I set up another newer used laptop as a backup, and didn't have to have a Microsoft login for that either.

When I do have to set it all up again after an update, it takes me about 15 minutes. I don't find that onerous relative to all the work I'd have to do to try to replicate everything on Linux, even though I've done a lot of stuff (and still do) with Linux command line on a bunch of little headless devices.

  lizby said  

I'm more likely to use AI or search for "how-to" on Youtube (where there are ads

check out YouTube without ads and skips sponsor messages
Edited 2026-02-02 03:20 by lew247

@ lew247: When I was on Windoze, I used iDrive for my backups.  Not OneDrive and not GoogleDrive for the same reasons you stated.

Mick does have an excellent point though, when he said: "It's on someone else's servers too. Have you ever met them? Would you trust them?"

I guess that is where you have to have a little faith and HOPE they are honest and reliable.
I've never had problems with iDrive, and they have a version that runs on Linux, so my iDrive backups happen on a daily basis, and once setup and working, it just does its thing in the background, and I hardly have to touch it.

Their Linux app is terminal based though.  No sexy GUI.  But it is easy to use, and as I said, once setup and working.....

I have a 5TB iDrive account(US$70 per year, multiple computers), cos I have lots of stuff backed up in there, but I really should trim the size down, cos if I deleted a lot of the older stuff, that would make a cheaper plan possible.  iDrive do a free 10GB account, which is probably enough for most, if all you want to backup, is documents/photos etc.

@ lizby: With W11, YMMV.  Seems like you are lucky enough with your one, and the debloating steps are probably the reason.  What we DO know is that for anyone running standard W11, with no such debloating having been done, or halting/stopping updates etc, then all Mary Hell is going on.  As I mentioned, I do expect MS will get this settled down for everyone in due course, but for many, the damage has been done.

USB external drives are really cheap and big. For US$130 I can get a 5T USB 3.0 drive, or for US$250 I can get a 10T version. Even a 2T version is just US$80. Write speed is around 5Gbps which would be much faster to do your incremental backups than are possible with Internet connected cloud drives, and your data never leaves your control.

I don't use any cloud drives to do backup as I am not sure the data will always be available or that it will not be used by the cloud company for their own benefit.

Since backup drives are so cheap, why use the cloud for backup?

If you want access from everywhere for some specific files, a cloud server could be handy but the amount of data you might need to have available 24 hours a day should be really small and can be stored on a free account in encrypted form. So a free dropbox or google type cloud drive would be ok if the data is end to end encrypted.

  tgerbic said  

Since backup drives are so cheap, why use the cloud for backup?

Redundancy.

I use the tripe-redundant backup method.
One backup locally, one on an external medium such as USB flash-drive, and one OFF-SITE backup, which is where the cloud comes in.

The idea is, that if your main machine explodes   , you can rebuild and then copy your files to the new machine from your USB backups.

If there is a fire or other natural disaster that destroys your home, it will destroy not only the working copy, but also the USB backup, if you keep that in the same house, so now you've lost ALL backup copies.

A copy in the cloud, means in such an unlikely event, once you have a new place to live, you can copy all your files back to your new setup, from the cloud backup.

That's not to say that the cloud company can't go bust or have some kind of massive fire or failure or something like that also, but if you found out that was the case, you have TIME to setup another cloud backup arrangement, and backup all your files to that.

Nothing's perfect, but the triple-redundant method has served me VERY well over the years.
This is only for my important CAD stuff, really.
My circuit-board designs and schematics and technical documents etc.
None of which are particularly commercially sensitive, so encryption is not really needed or a thing for me.
Edited 2026-02-02 15:16 by Grogster

Makes sense. Off-site can be handled many ways but I would probably reduce the size and put it on a couple of free servers. So dual external backup for free...

  Mick said  

Yes, it's inconvenient to lose stuff. Yes, some of it is of great sentimental value and may be irreplaceable, but how *important* is it really? People lose a lot more than some data every day.

Unless you can put a decent level of importance on the data is there a case for backing it up "just in case it's ever needed" at all?

I am certain Javavi has plenty of stories about that and recent fires here will have added more.
My own experience (Black Saturday) is that little of it is essential, a larger amount is inconvenient to loose, but you can get by without it.

Ever since I have kept all the files that are genuinely important on a USB stick on my keyring. Having bank and tax records,
plus lists of account numbers, passwords, insurance details, phone numbers etc. makes getting started again much easier. The phone numbers are incase your phone gets busted.

Another place to save files is on your phone SD card, incase you loose the keyring.

My only 'nit' with switching from my 'desktop' machine to Linux Mint is that some programs are installed as older versions.  No big deal, right?  Well...

In some cases, it can be.  I do a lot of work in Blender, for example... but the version I was using on Windows was 5, and the version installed from the Mint software library is 4.02.  You think, well, maybe everything will be ok.  But when you open a file, it almost completes loading, and the program crashes.

The solution seems simple enough... just download the version from Blender's website and install that.  But this is where the 'seamless' and 'easy' process ends.  

* The program will not install itself... it has no installer.
* Putting the program into the Menu structure is all on you... And many people don't know how to do it.
* The Linux Mint DEVs say that not using the repository versions will break the "reliability" goals of Linux Mint.  Meaning you are essentially compromising the quality of the Mint experience.

So.  It becomes a personal choice and a potential rabbit hole of technical steps that a user might not be very comfortable with.

Overall, though, no regrets... but I did have to get my hands dirty by opening the hood and doing some tinkering.

PS: I know some of you will mention that there is an unnoficial flatpak install.  Personally, I'm not a fan of this process, and the version available is not created or supported by Blender.org.  Blender.org *does* offer a SNAP version, but that, to me, is even more of a can of worms.
Edited 2026-02-03 00:09 by pwillard

  phil99 said  

I have kept all the files that are genuinely important on a USB stick on my keyring.

My process also, in addition to having offsite backup (a physical ssd drive), and network storage. I keep a 512GB USB drive in my pocket to which I make regular zipped backups. I recently bought a 4-year-old i7 Win11 laptop, and aside from the process of installing all the programs I want and getting all the system updates completed, I restored all data from the USB drive without even trying to access the network drive. All I had to do was expand the path (because I have a directory structure dating from 30+ years back), and everything worked as expected.

I can't say that all the files I back up are "genuinely important", but with 512GB (or more as needed), it doesn't matter.

~
Edited 2026-02-03 00:28 by lizby

@pwillard
Here is a PPA with the latest version

  Quote  

Here is a PPA with the latest version

Thanks.

Note: I also encountered an issue with my NVIDIA GTX 1060 card in Blender. Blender said I had no CUDA support (which seemed odd).  Not sure how to troubleshoot this issue, I asked ChatGPT for guidance.

Within a couple of minutes, I solved a problem that could have taken me the better part of a day if I had tried to resolve it on my own.

ChatGPT helped me find that my Linux install had this issue below, and what I needed to do to fix it:

✔ GPU fine

✔ Driver fine

✔ Kernel fine

❌ Xorg GLX vendor ordering was wrong

✅ Fixed cleanly and correctly

Nearly painless.

Well that 128Gb SSD turned up this morning so got it installed in that computer I got from work for free and on now making the a bootable USB so I load MX25 on the computer. It is a i7 with 16 gig of ram so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

In for sum fun this arvo.

Regards Bryan

well some fun indeed burnt the ISO on my house computer and setup this computer in my shed, so loaded up the computer then remembered I had to change the BIOS so it can boot off USB.

Well silly me got the USB first but didn't check all the others and went ahead and installed MX25.1.  

When it came to the reboot the OS failed to load and noway could I bringup the BOIS on startup. The only option was reboot and it was rinse and repeat so took out the SSD and booted up the BIOS to fix my stuff up.

Rebooted and got a message time wasn't set in the BIOS so went and did that then saved and reboot.

Now typing this message from MX25 so just under 2 hours to setup  

Regards Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Just a FYI in case you are interested, there are two Xfce versions.


However, the release below is the version that I've been using. It has been 100% reliable, with Kernel, MX desktop, MX desktop apps, along with my installed application all updated as they are released after testing: Not a single Glitch.

These are not test pre-releases, these are official approved updates from the MX servers and the application designers - IE : Brave, Firefox, and other installed Linux applications, you have the options.

The last incremental Kernel update now has full support for my latest Intel CPU and MB components, it worked without them, but things have been optimised, especially, the GPU and CPU core usage.    
     

It's still light and fast. I've compared this to both versions of Mint, Zorn, Ubuntu and others.
.
Edited 2026-02-03 14:25 by KeepIS

Keepis I just picked to the top one on the sourceforge webpage and used win32 disk imager and used my 32gig usb disk.

Now as I connected the network cable no issue with that so went and did a speed test where 17Mbps download and 13Mbps upload so not too shabby.

Did an upgrade where a new image was downloaded not long after the OS was installed then changed a few of the settings to suit me and it was getting a tad warm in the shed so I am happy that first step is done and that free computer that was going to scrap is up and working again

That 128gig SSD only cost $50 with postage so a cheap computer too.

A free i7 with 16GB RAM - wow!

Why would they have scrapped it?

John

  JohnS said  

A free i7 with 16GB RAM - wow!

Why would they have scrapped it?

John

As they were told they wouldn't run win11 also I saved 2 of them out of over 30