WINDOWS 7 TIP OF THE MONTH
MISSING YOUR OLD DESKTOP? NIK RAWLINSON FINDS OUT HOW TO CONFIGURE UBUNTU LINUX TO LOOK AND WORK LIKE WINDOWS 7
Miss Windows 7? We think we might just have the answer. Turn to p40 and find out how to transform Ubuntu Linux into a surprisingly convincing replica.
You shouldn’t be using Windows 7 today. As ofJanuary, it officially became an unsupported operating system, and the longer you carry on using it, the more insecure your PC becomes. That’s a shame, as the Windows 7 interface was one of the most popular Microsoft ever devised, and while Windows 10 greatly improves on Windows 8, there’s no way to switch back to anything resembling the old Windows 7 UI.
Fans of Windows 7 therefore find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, forced to either stick with an operating system that’s increasingly risky, or switch to an interface they’d rather not use.
But there’s a third way. It’s possible to customise Linux so as to bring the user experience impressively close to Windows 7. This option allows you to stick with a close approximation of your preferred look and feel, while benefiting from ongoing security updates.
It’s possible to do this with almost any flavour of Linux, but here we’ll focus on customising Ubuntu, since that distribution came top in our Linux distros Labs test ( see issue 308, p78) – and the core code is used by a wide variety of other distros, for which the principles will be the same.
INSTALL LINUX
The first step is installing Linux. It’s possible to install Linux and Windows side by side, and choose between the two each time you boot, but since our intention is to move off Windows 7 altogether, we’re going to wipe the hard disk and make Linux our sole operating system. Needless to say, you’ll want to back up any files you want to keep before proceeding, as you won’t be able to retrieve them afterwards.