OPEN SOURCE Windows 7’s Swansong Is Opportunity for Penguins
WHETHER YOU’RE BUILDING a home server from an old PC or simply breathing new life into a well-loved laptop, there’s a good chance that older hardware is still perfectly fine under Linux. Just because Windows 7 is in its final year doesn’t mean your PC has
As Windows progresses, older versions fall by the wayside. The latest victim of time’s relentless march is Windows 7, which will see the end of extended support on January 14, 2020. This presents three sensible possibilities for a Win 7 machine: retirement and replacement, upgrade to Windows 10, or install and run Linux.
As long as I’ve been a Linux user, it’s been hard to convince people to try—let alone switch to— Linux on a brand-new PC. To be fair, there’s good reason not to: Each new Windows version has flashy new features and interfaces. And, usually, everything works as intended out of the box.
Historically, it was rarely smooth sailing for a new Linux install, especially on newer hardware. Some things were quirky or didn’t work at all, with wireless networking being the brunt of many a joke about desktop Linux. Nowadays, the vast majority of new hardware works under Linux without a hitch. Sure, you might need a proprietary driver or two—*cough* Nvidia *cough*—but you can be pretty certain that most chipsets and devices will work on Linux at some level of functionality.
Linux is really good at supporting older hardware. For the average user, this means that Linux will generally work really well on old PCs. If you’ve recently upgraded your main machine over the holidays, and have old hardware lying around, you can keep the old rig out of landfill and get a few more useful years out of it as a backup rig, guest machine, server, or hand-me-down.
One of the primary reasons this is possible is due to how lightweight Linux desktops are. Some of the more feature-rich desktop environments, such as KDE or GNOME, aren’t that resource-intensive at idle. However, if your system doesn’t have much memory to work with, XFCE remains my go-to for a stable, lightweight desktop that has a reasonable level of visual polish. If you’re running a system with less than 4GB of RAM, I’d stick to XFCE, and save the RAM for memory-hungry browsers.
If you do install a distribution that comes with KDE or GNOME by default, there’s no reason why you can’t install XFCE alongside it as the primary desktop environment, provided you have the storage to spare. If that SSD upgrade is on a smaller inexpensive drive, and you really need the extra gigabytes, you can always uninstall GNOME or KDE.
If you’re updating your desktop or laptop with a new SSD (which is always a good upgrade for an old system that uses an HDD for system storage), don’t fear: Linux has been playing nice with SSDs since kernel 3.8. (The current stable kernel is 4.20.) As long as you use a modern filesystem— such as ext4, which is the default on most Linux distributions—you’ll be fine.
There’s no promise that Linux will fit every user’s needs, but the fact remains that most users now do a large portion of their work in web browsers. For this purpose, Linux works just fine. There’s a few quirks and differences in UI, but by installing Chromium or Firefox in Ubuntu on an old laptop, there’s no need to shell out the $100 for a Windows 10 license just to browse Facebook or use Google Drive.
Before retiring that laptop or desktop, take a day and see how Linux works in your use case. You could save yourself a hundred bucks, or at least learn (or teach someone) something new.