So, a friend of mine is in the market for a laptop in the < $500 range, for casual personal use. I am tempted to tell this person to look for the laptop with the best Linux potential, like a Chromebook, and just install Mint on it; or, at the very least, try to find one that still comes with Windows 7. Am I wrong to dis-recommend Windows 10?

This person doesn't play games, but wants a higher capacity drive (200GB or greater). Swapping out the drive of, say, a Chromebook, for a higher capacity one would be fine.

I use vanilla Slackware on an Acer C740 Chromebook myself (in developer mode), but I am a little hesitant to recommend it, at least with the setup I have, which results in somewhat subpar battery life, spotty wifi, and no suspend.

I am tentatively going to recommend a Chromebook C740 upgraded with a 256 GB SSD, with Linux Mint installed, but I am interested to hearing other possibilities. If there are competitive Windows 7 options, that is probably less a hassle for me, since I'd be installing Linux and upgrading the drive for this person.

Chromebook: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Chromebook-C740-C4PE-11-6-inch-16GB/dp/B00SQG3MQE
Drive: http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-MTS400-Solid-State-TS64GMTS400/dp/B00KLTPSKM

Yes, you're wrong to dis-recommend Windows 10. For casual users, this is the best Windows ever, period. That doesn't mean that I dislike Chromebooks or Linux (though I haven't tried Mint in particular). However, if your concern is their casualness, recommending Mint over Windows 10 doesn't make sense to me. OSX, which has become stagnant IMO, & Windows 10, which is a breath of fresh air in many ways, are likely far more user-friendly than any Linux distro, especially when there are problems to resolve.

Ah, OK. I'll have to look into what good options there are for Windows 10 laptops.

Those two things are antonyms. Linux is only for people that already use Linux.

Go for an off-lease Lenovo Thinkpad. X-series if it needs to be mobile, T-series otherwise. There's boatloads of them on Ebay. Try to find one with a docking station that specifies that it's off-lease -- odds are its previous owner would have left it in the docking station full time, so the keyboard will still be in perfect condition.

Totally false. I've set my mother up on Linux Mint for her desktop, and it's been an incredibly smooth experience for her. It automatically updates itself, almost never has to be rebooted, has a GUI (Cinnamon) which is equal or better to Windows in terms of ease of use and user-friendliness, and has an excellent replacement for MS Office (LibreOffice).

The mentality that Linux has to be an arcane and difficult to use system is outdated in 2016.

I digress though, since at least for laptops, Linux probably isn't a viable option anyway, since suspend isn't always guaranteed to work on every model (although things may be better now).

A quick google search tells me that "off lease" means refurbished. Are they the same thing?

Thank you for that incredibly informative post.

Quoth the Stallcrotch: "No command prompt only - no GNU/Linux"

(There are people on the Interwebs who genuinely believe that, but most of their crotches have indeed stalled and they will luckily never reproduce)

I almost installed Ubuntu on my horribad HP Windows Vista laptop way back when I thought I'd try and make it less horribad (and just out of kix). Even loading the installer's graphics was too much for the laptop so I couldn't get started, so a genuine FGR/Linux experience never came to fruition.

Lesson: Don't get HP laptops. And for that matter, Windows 10 is pretty good (even though it'll feel significantly better if one has never used Windows 7).

I don't think you're entirely incorrect here, in the age of Mint, Ubuntu, etc., but when there's problems, & there will eventually be problems, they'll likely be a bit more difficult to resolve in Linux. Windows, & to a lesser extent, OSX, have gotten reasonably good at automatically fixing things or at least pointing you in the right direction. I don't think that Linux is quite there yet. However, when something like Ubuntu is up & running & if the user's needs are few, it can be just as easy, or nearly as easy to use as the other major OS's.

Dude, I use Linux everywhere for everything. I haven't used anything else in over 10 years. I love it. It's great.
But "desktop linux" isn't ready for normal people. It's close, sure, and for simple usecases it can be fine, but I would never roll it out to a normal user.


...a "simple usecase" being something like a kiosk that only ever runs a web browser.

She's my mother, as I've said. When the rare problem arises, I fix it for her, and it usually only takes a minute or two to fix. Also, the drive is set up as an LVM filesystem, and backups and restores are incredibly easy.

She's not an average user, in the mathematical sense of the word. She is a very casual user, who uses the computer for browsing the web, editing office documents, and downloading pictures off of her camera.

Yeah Linux isn't as user friendly. I use it on my laptops which I don't play any games on.

I recently upgraded my desktop and was going to install Windows 7 but my motherboard doesn't have the chip installed that default Windows 7 drivers recognize. I couldn't install it without some hacky patch so I just installed Windows 10 instead. So far it's been great for me.

Agreed. I used my iMac for a Ubuntu/XMBC media server for a few years & my daughter & wife were able to consume their media, as well as browse the web, use LibreOffice, etc., but as soon as an update broke something (this happens, even with the likes of the Ubuntu Software Center), I'd hear "Papa, l'ordinateur est casse!" I still have nightmares about trying to walk my wife through repairing rEFIt over the telephone or trying to sync up her iPhone. However, if he's willing to be the one on call, more power to him. Personally, I wouldn't want the headache, which is why I reinstalled OSX & said "here, ****ers, do it yourself." In the end, he'll likely just be spending more quality time with his mother, so assuming their relationship is good, it's a win-win. When I was in college, I didn't buy a washing machine just so I could have an excuse to go visit my parents every week & partake in some good eats.

+1

I have a Thinkpad X230 that's been going 4 years or so strong (I'm using it right now, juggling between Massassi and porn like I always do). I think you can get the same model cheap on ebay, upgrade the RAM to 16 GB and throw in a SSD. Problem is the screen size though.

I'm not a diehard Thinkpad nerd, but I've been hearing the quality dipped after the X230 with the X240 and X250. I've been looking for a beefier laptop and been eyeing the new t460p.

It's true, but it's not limited to the X-series. And I particularly hate their new keyboards.

Yeah, the X and T models seem to have become lighter and thinner though ... but at what cost? I know "build quality" is a nebulous term, but I don't Thinkpad Tough rings much anymore.

The t460p supposedly has ABS plastic holding the screen, making the structure feel shoddily made, and has heat issues because the heat pipes can only do so much with the thin enclosure. Makes me hesitant on the purchase.

I don't know much about laptops anymore. My work supplied me with a stupid mac. I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a while ago and while it's fast and I haven't had any issues with it, the screen sucks. It's super dim and almost impossible to get a decent viewing angle. I'm going to pay more attention to the type of panel next time I buy a laptop.

Thanks, Brian. I'll watch out for dim screens. I am also avoiding glossy screens, which AFAIK are functionally inferior to their matte counterparts.

For those of you who are telling me that things are just peachy with Windows 10, can any of you refute this?

(Rated: NSFW, language)

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMKnMvwc3qs

Well, I doubt it's Obama's fault.

Windows is horrible software and I have no clue what people are talking about when they claim it's easier for novices to fix and maintain.

Literally 100%, when something goes seriously wrong on Windows, you get a 2 second winky face blue screen with a cryptic error number. If you have a ****ing eidetic memory you might be able to type it into your phone, and then stumble across an MSDN community thread full of complaints and zero solutions. But for most people, the information is gone long before you've had a chance to read it, let alone copy it somewhere, and most of the time it's not complete anyway.

So how do you figure out what really went wrong? You need to boot into Windows to use the event viewer. If you can't boot Windows you are ****ed. And sometimes you're ****ed regardless, because the event messages are worthless.

A few weekends ago I had to fix my wife's Windows 10 PC. It wouldn't boot anymore, complaining that a file was corrupt. What file, you ask? ****ed if I know. Windows wouldn't tell me. It wasn't printed anywhere, it wasn't logged anywhere, and recovery mode couldn't replace it for whatever reason.

So I did what 100% of Windows users do 100% of the time: I reinstalled Windows.

And then it happened again.

At this point, if I were a Windows novice, I probably would have thrown out the computer and bought a new one. Because really, what the **** else are my options at this point? Get a five year old budget computer fixed at Best Buy? **** off. It's going in a dumpster. That's what I've been trained to do as a Windows user.

But fortunately, I know "cryptic" Linux commands. So I booted into Linux, and very quickly found out that Windows had disabled TRIM in what I can only assume was a successful suicide. I replaced the drive, reinstalled history's ****tiest software, and it's all working again. You know, as much as Windows ever does.

The difference here is that I had a path to success on Linux. Was it difficult? Did I need to know what I was doing? Yeah. But the fact that Windows is a pit of failure does not mean it is easier, it just means there is less to learn.

Oh, here's a fun Windows 10 fact: They disabled Shift+F8 to make it boot faster. The only way to get into Safe Mode is to reboot from Normal Mode.

Enjoy that easy problem resolution experience, folks.

I wonder if Microsoft has done anything* about the rather widely spread issue (I know at least 3 people who faced it) where previous Windows 7/8 computers simply just stopped working altogether following a Windows Update, wouldn't boot up again at all so you couldn't reach BIOS or anything. Two of those three people had to get a new computer.

(* = Probably not)

While we're ****ting on Windows in this thread, I may as well mention the reason I broke down and installed Mint on my mom's desktop.

The HP Stream 200 Mini Desktop came with a 32GB SSD, with Windows 8 installed. I decided to upgrade the SSD with a larger capacity SSD. However, the machine has no optical disk drive, and so naturally there was no recovery disk. The only option to re-install the licensed copy of Windows 8 was to order a (IIRC) $50 USB flash drive from HP in the mail.

Since this is bull****, I decided to image the SSD, copy it to a larger SSD, and then resize the partition.

Well, it turns out that this is not possible. At all. There is some very special partition sitting in the middle of the drive, containing protected UEFI files, which is impossible to get rid of by all the normal tricks (and trust me, I tried).

So, my choice was either to live with the inconvenience that my disk space was split between two different partitions, or just nuke the thing and install Mint Linux. Since then, it has been essentially maintenance free(I don't even live in the same city as my mom, and she has only had one minor issue which was solved by power cycling the machine), and is easier to use.

Are you ****ing kidding me? God ****ing dammit.

Refute what? Why would anyone tell a casual user to avoid updates? As a casual Windows 10 user (I only run it on my gaming notebook) I haven't run into this issue. Updates download & install automatically & if a reboot is needed, I save what I'm doing, & do it immediately, like a normal human being. As a matter of fact, the first thing I do every time I open & power on my notebook is updates. However, I'm not much at procrastination, so this seems like a non-issue to me.

The only issue that I've had under Windows 10 was my wife's WiFi adapter drivers committing suicide after running Windows Update for the first time. I ran the Windows 10 diagnostic tool, it mentioned to me that there was a problem with the driver, I opened up Device Manager, clicked update driver, et voila. That issue alone would've ****ed thousands of casual users in most, if not all, previous Windows versions & I know this to be true because I used to work in tech support at a cable company & had to walk people through that sort of **** all day long. I still maintain that resolving issues that are resolvable by casual users is far easier in Windows 10 than in Linux. Can't one boot to Safe Mode via their Recovery Disk? They should really be doing more to make sure that users create those. They've made it relatively simple, but it's also just as simple to ignore.

I dunno, did a clean install of Windows 10 about a month ago and it's been a fine experience for me so far. I'd run only Linux, but I play computer games with people.

Never had this OS force me to update, though, so where that comes from I'm not sure.

I suppose you're right. I still find his reaction pretty amusing.

In other news, my Chromebook (this one running ChromeOS) just locked up and required a restart while I'd been typing this post.

Given that you aren't swearing every other word, yes, I can tell you've never had to diagnose nontrivial hardware failure in Windows 10.

Let's be totally honest about what you're saying here:

The driver "stopped working", but you don't know why, and Windows doesn't provide the tools to tell you. Windows is at least smart enough to tell you which driver stopped working, which is good, because that way you only had to reinstall part of Windows to get it working instead of the whole thing.

Is that about right?

How is that a technical win for anybody?

Drivers that "stop working" is an invented problem, so if I were you I wouldn't be so quick to praise automatic "hit it until it works" repairwork.

I'll reiterate: Windows is much, much harder to fix. In truth, it's almost impossible to fix. It just seems easier because Windows has **** upon your mental model for so long that "fixing" means the same thing as "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out".

There are plenty of situations where you can't or don't want to reboot and install updates, almost none of which relate to procrastination. Long builds and tests, simulations/computations, rendering video, large uploads, presentations, business meetings, when you have open programs that have very long load times. And it's not like the machine comes right back up again, either. It's usually 5-10 minutes depending on the updates it's installing. Automatic rebooting can be a major disruption.

Couldn't you have ordered a cheap USB key & created your own Recovery Disk? I recently did this in Windows Vista with an old Packard Bell notebook that someone gave me. A USB key large enough to handle an OS is like $5.

Yeah, Jon'C, but we're not talking about which OS is #1 best in world, we're talking about which one is the best for casual users. (I've also been assuming that they intend to maintain this status.) Most casual users that I've encountered can't even tell you which version of Windows they're running, despite the sticker next to their keyboard. I really don't think that my grandma is going to have an easier time resolving her WiFi issue in Linux than in Windows 10. As a matter of fact, if she's running Debian, like me, she'll have to acquire them from a non-free repository before she can even have WiFi in the first place. At least in Windows 10 it works out of the box, so long as you know your credentials. Don't even get me started on Bluetooth issues, or syncing with an iPhone.

The best OS for casual users is iOS. Let's not pretend that Windows can even rate when driver maintenance is a routine thing that casual users are expected to do. (Edit: speaking of iOS, damn thing autocorrected casual to causal)

As far as normal people are concerned, both Windows and Linux are equally impenetrable. You are seriously overestimating the average computer user if you think Windows Diagnostics is meaningfully better than dmesg.

Yeah, you might be right about this, just so long as the recovered installation didn't have the same harebrained partition scheme based on the original 32GB drive.

We don't really miss Windows 8, though.

As for Linux vs. Windows, my experience is that once (a friendly distro of) Linux is up and running, it is less problematic than Windows, but if something goes terribly wrong, I need to fix it myself.

Also in my experience: eventually family members come asking for your help at "fixing their computer", whether or not it's running Linux or Windows. Fixing Windows generally involves more cursing, as Jon says, so I always pick the former when I can.

I can imagine these scenarios & others (though I think few people would associate someone doing week or months long builds as a casual user), but in the end, the guy in the video is using Windows 10, & Microsoft has obviously shifted to the OS as a service scheme, & have stated relatively plainly for over a year that they'd push these updates automatically, etc. If he's rendering something that exceeds the allotted length of the deferred updates feature, which is apparently months for non-security updates (according to a snippet of the EULA that I just saw from Googling), he's ****ing himself. We can debate about whether or not one should be permitted to defer security updates as well, but Microsoft has decided to go this route, he has decided to use their service, & though he certainly has the right to complain, we shouldn't permit him to get away with acting surprised (though he's obviously unstable & may actually be).

P.S. Sorry about editing my earlier post that you quoted. I'm not used to people being on at the same time as me, & I've developed a nasty habit of typing out-loud, submitting (because of the short time before I'm automatically logged out) & editing, which I need to correct.

I think you are taking that video a bit too seriously. A pissed off consumer for sure, but also clearly hamming it up.