COMPUTER NEWS – TRANSITION TO LINUX
Over the past few weeks, I have been gradually transitioning from Windows to Linux. There has been a great deal of news going around the Internet about the drastic changes Microsoft has been making to their latest operating system, Windows 11, resulting in individuals, corporations, institutions and even governments around the world abandoning Windows in droves, in favour of Mac or Linux. For details of what has been going on, one only has to do a search on YouTube and there is plenty of information on the subject. (I wouldn’t rely on mainstream media for news of this or any other kind these days… independent sources are best.)
A little background
A couple of years ago I came across DaVinci Resolve, which is a very powerful, free and open-source application for video editing. The only equivalents were Adobe Premier (only available via expensive subscription) or Final Cut Pro (Mac only, also paid for). Windows has always been rather badly served when it comes to decent video editing software. I downloaded a Domestika course on how to use DaVinci Resolve, and proceeded to install it on my HP Envy laptop. It failed to work. I discovered that this program requires a pretty powerful computer to run it, something the teacher of the course did not mention. This was quite a disappointment.
When Black Friday week came around, I decided finally (after many months of considering the matter) to invest in a powerful laptop and opted for an HP ZBook. I might have made a different choice, given the knowledge I now have, but the decision was made. I also bought a large monitor which would make my photo and video editing easier, and got good discounts on both. The very charming and helpful young man from HP with whom I communicated, advised me about deals they were offering, and I settled for this. When I came to the final checkout I saw that he had given me a further discount, so I did extremely well out of this transaction.
The computer arrived with Windows 11 already installed. I didn’t get as far as installing DaVinci Resolve, because in the meantime I was moving towards the idea of transitioning to Linux. Many years ago I had a brief foray into this alternative open-source operating system and quickly abandoned it as it was extremely non-user-friendly and everything was in geek-speak which I didn’t understand! However, in the intervening years, things have moved on greatly, especially recently when people are waking up to the fact that the world has been enslaved by Microsoft who increasingly control what we do with our computers, forcing us to use their software and paying subscriptions rather than purchasing programs outright as we always did in the past. With the advent of Copilot, their AI system introduced with Windows 11, things have got a lot worse, with fully justified fears of security breaches and other serious matters. People are waking up to the fact that there are alternatives, and the developers of Linux recognise that many newcomers need a helping hand to move as seamlessly and painlessly as possible from the Windows environment they have grown up with, and many “distros” (short for distributions – different versions) of the Linux platform, are designed to make this transition easy.
Another laptop
When I finally decided to take the plunge, and after a lot of online research, I found that one of the most Linux-friendly computers was the Lenovo ThinkPad. Many corporations use this computer, and lease numerous laptops for their employees, and replace them every couple of years. This means that there is always a ready market for second-hand reconditioned laptops available, which are not the latest model. Linux is very friendly to older computers which often function much more efficiently in that environment than with power-hungry Windows, and even gamers have been surprised how smoothly their games will run even on older and less powerful computers. This is largely to do with the amount of “bloat” included with Windows which constantly runs in the background whether you want it or not, devouring RAM and making the computer run a lot less efficiently.
I found a very reasonably priced 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad on YouTube and bought it. It does not have sufficient power, or a large enough hard drive to run DaVinci Resolve, but I thought I would use this as a test for running Linux. Some people have a dual-boot system with Windows and Linux running on the same computer, in separate partitions on their hard drive, but Microsoft does not like this, and very frequently people are reporting that certain Windows updates will trash the Linux partition and destroy all their work. On a cheap second-hand computer I decided to replace the Windows 10 which was already on it, and do a complete installation of the Linux distro Zorin, which was recommended, along with Mint, as being extremely user-friendly for Windows migrants.
Getting up and running
Like many people arriving from Windows, I made the mistake of trying to make the computer as compatible with Windows as possible. There is an app called Wine which allows you to run Windows programs on the Linux platform, but it won’t run everything, and what it will run often doesn’t function as well as on Windows. As an alternative, some people set up a virtual machine running Windows but I didn’t want to go down that route.
I struggled a lot in those early days trying to get my favourite old programs to work. My ancient Serif software (PhotoPlus for photo editing, and PagePlus for desktop publishing) wouldn’t install at all which was a big disappointment. I couldn’t get Wine to work properly, and it was only after some lengthy discussion on the excellent Zorin forum that I got the help I needed, to clean the whole thing off and make a fresh start with it. By this time I decided to bite the bullet and adjust my thinking – I found an excellent YouTube video on this, where it was suggested that a lot of people had problems in these early days because they were hanging on to the Windows mindset. What we needed was an adjustment in our thinking, and to embrace a new system and learn to use the software that is designed to work with it, rather than trying to squeeze Windows stuff into a mould it didn’t really fit.
There was one Windows application that I didn’t want to lose, and that was Directory Opus, a file manager which I have used for years. It works OK with Wine, but some features, such as dragging and dropping for copying and moving, don’t work, but I can live with the extra clicks needed to perform those functions. Actually, the Zorin file manager is pretty good and I have got quite used to it now, with its different approach.
Zorin comes with Libre Office installed. This is the equivalent of Microsoft Office, but it is free and open-source. I was delighted to find that I could alter the user interface so that the menu bar resembled the old 2003 Microsoft Word. I had continued using this after Microsoft introduced the ribbon with their 2007 version, which I really hated. With Libre Office Writer (the equivalent of Word) and Calc (Excel), you can save your files in the native format or in the Windows format, so you can continue to share files with Windows users if you wish. When I opened my spreadsheets (created in Excel) for our monthly accounts, I found that they ran perfectly with Calc, with all my formulae already in place – I just have to open the files and they run as normal. This is great.
I am continuing to use Firefox as my browser, and have installed Nord VPN and NordPass (password manager). There was a bit of trouble installing the graphic user interface (GUI) for Nord VPN but I soon had it up and running with help from members of the forum.
We all do a lot of stuff online these days anyway, so this doesn’t change with the transition to a different operating system. You can still use your Google account, watch YouTube, use Ebay etc. etc. and even continue with your Microsoft cloud stuff if you really want to!
Back to the HP ZBook
Once I was quite happy using Linux on the ThinkPad, it was time to install Zorin on the ZBook. It was then that I discovered that HP isn’t quite as friendly towards Linux as Lenovo is, and that people often have problems getting things to run smoothly. This is particularly the case with high-end laptops with third-party graphics cards, which my ZBook has – it has an Nvidia card, ready to run powerful video editing software.
I had problems with the computer refusing to restart and shut down properly. The only way I could manage this was to do a hard shutdown each time – holding down the power button for 10-15 seconds until everything closed down, and then rebooting. Sometimes I would get a black screen with endless white text scrolling, sometimes too fast to read, and when I could read it, it was totally incomprehensible. The only word I could understand was “error.” Not encouraging. I tried to get help on the forum and they seemed to agree that this was a graphics driver problem (which I had anticipated), and offered various solutions, none of which worked. Much of it was quite beyond my understanding anyway. When someone suggested that it looked as if something had become disconnected inside the laptop, and I should open it up and take a look, I knew I’d come to the end of the road. There was no way I was going to start tinkering around in that direction, with my total lack of knowledge!
Time to call in the professionals
We have a local computer firm where we’ve taken computers in for hardware problems, but I wasn’t sure whether they’d be able to help with this. Searching online, I found a lot of local firms offering support, mostly with hardware issues, and nobody seemed to mention Linux. Eventually I found one which said they could help with software installation and driver issues, so I contacted them.
I got Richard, the owner of this small business, and he was absolutely charming and only too happy to help. He was well familiar with Linux (as a long-time user himself) and also with the current Microsoft shenanigans, and agreed to have a look at the problem. I said my hubby would bring me in in a day or two if that was OK, and he said no – he would come to me, and would tomorrow suit me? I was amazed.
He duly turned up on Wednesday of last week. I had set up both the HP ZBook and the Lenovo ThinkPad on the dining table, and got the Internet details, passwords/PINs etc. all ready, and the bootable USB drive for reinstalling Linux if necessary. We settled down for the afternoon. In the end it took SIX HOURSÂ to fix everything!
My computer was stubborn and obdurate and wouldn’t do what he wanted, time and again. He knew what to search for, and used AI, which he said saved loads of time as it searches through numerous websites simultaneously for answers, which would have taken him at least half an hour for each query. Often it would come up with five or six different suggestions, and invariably it was the last one on the list that got us anywhere!
He tried installing one Nvidia graphics driver after another (which didn’t work) and then after installing another one, we lost the graphics interface altogether and were presented with a black screen, which meant, of course, that there was no way of getting in to try something else. After all the work that he had done at this point (and some progress had been made), the only thing to do was to reinstall Linux again from scratch, using the USB bootable drive I’d created from the Zorin download site. Back to square one.
This time it didn’t take so long to get to where we’d been before, as he knew the steps he’d taken to get there. Fortunately, the scrolling white text appeared again, which he had not yet seen, and I hadn’t been able to explain what that was all about. He realised that there was something preventing shut-down and re-booting – a message was trying to reach the motherboard to facilitate this but it was being continually blocked, hence the repeated endless scrolling text. Looking at the (meaningless to me!) code, he identified this as the laptop’s card reader – nothing to do with Nvidia drivers at all! He was able to “blacklist” this bit of code and disable the card reader, and this instantly solved the problem – the laptop responded like a lamb and rebooted with no problem. I told him I never used the card reader anyway, so it was no loss.
Installing DaVinci Resolve
This was the final stage of our journey. Again, it was not straightforward. He said, which confirmed what I already knew from my researches, that this software is finicky and difficult with Linux, although they state on their website that it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux. DaVinci Resolve really only works with Linux distros based on a different foundation from the one I am using and there is no support for anything else. However, he was able to tweak things, going deep under the bonnet into areas I would never have been able to do myself, and got it to run.
We then had a problem with some test videos, to import them into the software. It was only then, with some more research, that we discovered that the most common video formats (mp4 video files, with H264 codec) are not recognised by the free version of DaVinci Resolve, but only on the Pro (paid for) version. I think this is pretty unreasonable, because these are formats that everybody uses! Again, the teacher of the course I intend to follow, does not mention anything about this. He is clearly using the Pro version. I had already watched his introductory videos on how to set up the preferences etc.
We then had to find a way of converting normal videos into the format that the software would recognise. Richard downloaded a selection of video editors for Linux, most of which wouldn’t do it at all, despite boasting that they handled numerous file formats. Eventually we found Shotcut, which will convert the videos, but the files are enormous. Richard altered the preferences to reduce the size of the files but they were still pretty big. The laptop is fortunately powerful enough to deal with all of this, and he said that once you render the video and export it in the normal mp4/H246 format, all will be well. At least we were able to import some test videos onto the timeline and everything seemed to be fine.
It will be a while before I get going with DaVinci Resolve, because I have a lot of catching up to do. Since Richard’s visit, I have been installing the various apps onto the laptop that I want, and getting it up and running just as well as the ThinkPad. Also, I have been quite poorly with a throat infection and cough for a couple of weeks and have been too tired to do much, and other areas of my life have been neglected and needed attention! However, things are improving now and I have taken great strides forward with these various issues and the laptop is perfectly workable now.
It was very useful having him working on the computer here at home, because I was present throughout, and was able to answer his questions, and explain what had been going on, and what I wanted, and so on. He ended up charging me a ridiculously low amount for six hours of hard work, using his experience and expertise, and when I queried this, he said that he had a great sense of achievement for having got everything working, and my body language and facial expression were enough evidence of how pleased I was with the result! Throughout, whenever he was faced with a problem that wasn’t getting solved, he would say that he refused to leave me with a computer that wasn’t working properly, and he was absolutely determined to fix it for me. What a total star. I know where to go if I ever have any computer problems in the future!
Getting organised
At last I am getting the computers organised. Last year, when I got the HP ZBook, I took my original HP Envy upstairs to the office. This is a pretty good laptop and did most things (apart from the video editing I wanted to do) perfectly satisfactorily. My older HP laptop (HP Pavilion) was starting to get pretty sluggish and half the time wouldn’t connect to the Internet, so I ditched it, and replaced it with the Envy which has been working pretty well up there.
I have now moved the Lenovo ThinkPad into the office and will run that (with Linux) as the office machine. The HP Envy runs on Windows 11. I intend to keep this as a Windows laptop so I can run my Serif PagePlus (desktop publisher) for which there really isn’t a decent Linux equivalent, and I also need it in order to use my electronic cutting machine in the studio. I shall disconnect this computer from the Internet so I don’t get plagued with Microsoft updates and problems, and it won’t be at risk of attack as it will be isolated.
The HP ZBook is now the main laptop, which lives downstairs where I spend most of the time on the computer. I have a large 15TB external hard drive which I use as primary storage for all my media (music, pictures, videos) and the ZBook backup, and two smaller 5 TB external drives for the media backup and the backups from the other computers. The small drives are easy to carry upstairs to connect to the office or studio machines as required.
Printing from the Linux computer is a doddle. I couldn’t believe it the first time I plugged in the printer – the computer recognised it immediately and installed the driver without any help from me! In fact, installing software on a Linux computer is very simple – much easier, and much safer, than the Windows method as everything is in a repository and guaranteed to be safe. Everything goes in really quickly. Also, unmounting external drives happens really quickly (unlike my previous Windows experience) and booting up and shutting down is much more rapid, too. Updates happen when you want, and not when the operating system decides (this is what has been upsetting so many people with Windows lately). It is easy to check for necessary updates, and one click does the trick.
A great outcome
My transition to Linux has not exactly been painless, but much of that was due to my reluctance to abandon my Windows mindset at the beginning. I am now running Linux quite happily, and not noticing that much difference, apart from it being much better in most respects. Now that I am learning the different ways that are required to do things, it is becoming part of muscle memory and not a problem – I am already doing things without thinking about it, and enjoying the experience.
Once I’ve got everything finally set up on my own system, my hubby has agreed to my installing Linux on one of his laptops so he can learn it. He really only uses the computer for basic stuff – a bit of work on Word, surfing the Net, buying and selling on Ebay, watching YouTube. He doesn’t do any graphics or video work, or use spreadsheets or any fancy schmancy stuff, and once he’s found his way around Linux, I am sure he will be fine, and I am here to help him. I told him that initially he should keep one of his laptops running Windows in case he needs to do something quickly on a system he is familiar with, but for most of the time, to concentrate on the Linux machine so he gets to learn it and become accustomed to it. He is aware of the current Microsoft problems which I think is making him slightly less reluctant to make the change!
I would recommend this transition to anyone. Most people don’t have the number of problems that I have had, and there is help out there. Most Linux distros have their own dedicated forums and these days most people on there are happy to help the newbies and not overwhelm them with geek-speak. I always ask for replies in plain English anyway, and most people are happy to oblige. YouTube is great too – lots of videos to help, and explain things, and advise on the best way to make the transition. Above all, it is free!
The main reason for making the transition has to be to escape the betrayal of Microsoft. Who needs that hassle? They have behaved despicably and the world is waking up to the fact and walking away in droves. They’ve really shot themselves in the foot and Bill Gates is reputed to be furious.
