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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Leaving the Sinking ship - Moving to Linux
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KeepIS Guru  Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
I never though I would, but with some more evil planned for Win11 and beyond, I could not stay. I have my Win11 installs set to never update to the last major OS upgrade, so they are at least still clean from the latest forced crap and MS AI. Over the past few days I have tried a few Linux installations on a 250GB Samsung external SSD, easy 400M read write, so should give me an idea of a real install. I tried the latest UBUNTU from Canonical, very nice and I found it easy to use and navigate, and with only a few hours under my belt I had VirtualBox running a copy of Win11 on the Desktop on a dual screen which Ubuntu setup correctly. Win 11 under VirtualBox was fine for small programs but it's never going to run Visual Studio fast enough, but it did run it. However I found a few flaky issues with some tasks (not related to to running a VM) in that latest version of Ubuntu. BTW I tried WinBoat, now relabeled to BETA, this is flaky and was not faster than VirtualBox but did load the VM a bit faster. I tried Wine and Bottles but this is limited and will not do what I want. Finally I tried Zorin 18 Core based on Ubuntu. Love it - Everything is logical and just works, tried VirtualBox using the Win11 VM I had previously made, it loaded fine but a couple of Terminal commands needed to allow disk and USB access and it was running, obviously still slow with Visual Studio. I grabbed a new 1TB Samsung pro M2 card, lower cost then a 2.3 SSD, and installed it in the i7 NUC, it has 16GB memory. I installed Zorin on a second partition and cloned my existing 500gb M2 drive of Windows 11 to the first partition on the 1TB drive. BTW Zorin has a beautiful looking OS boot selector. I wondered if the simplest way to effectively run Windows from Linux would be to simply run it on a small separate low cost spare NUC that I have, and do a remote Desktop Window from Zorin - it was absolutely brilliant, just like using the Windows NUC from the keyboard and screen. Linux on one screen, Windows 11 on the 2nd screen, and no laggy VM. I used RustDesk, the Windows version is just an executable and the Linux version is also just a click and run, it configures everything in both Windows and Linux, nothing to do but enter the machine ID the first time and password. It was that simple. I swear it took 20 seconds to get running and connected, and it's free open source I think. In the past 4 days I've learnt enough to easily use the Terminal for some simple tasks, I've had no trouble finding solutions on the Zorin forums and even general searches with the error info in the search bar. Linux  Microsoft  Edited 2025-10-30 15:04 by KeepIS NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
After some more testing, the Virtual Machine is about as fast an a Beelink NUC with a Celeron N5105 4 cores with 8GB mem @ 2Ghz. The VM is running on Zorin on an i7-NUC with 8 cores @ 3.7Ghz with 16GB memory. The VM is allocated 4 cores and 8GB of memory, same as the Celeron NUC. The test was loading Visual studio and running a big code program in debug mode, there was little difference. Between the Celeron NUC and the VM on Lunix. . NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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David Newbie  Joined: 13/10/2025 Location: AustraliaPosts: 11 |
I run MacOS mainly, dropping back to a Win 10 machine for those few tasks not supported by Apple. My other desktop runs Linux Mint which I am more than happy with. I believe that Win 11 and its AI are a pernicious force for evil, and as such will never support it. However, my current favourite is MMbasic on the CMM2. *** VK5DLZ *** |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9738 |
The main issue seems to be that MS are now of the opinion that: "You WILL do things OUR way, and you WILL phucking LIKE IT!" Apologies for the pseudo-language. That was what drove me to Linux a few weeks ago, and it(LMDE6) is brilliant. It does EVERYTHING that I need it to do, is free, has superb hardware support, and everything....JUST WORKS - right out of the box, from the install. I have now put two people onto Linux Mint in this last week alone. They were complaining about the fact that their W10 machine needed to be REPLACED to run W11 - it doesn't. Linux Mint runs beautifully on all old W10 machines. I wonder if MS have overstepped things a little, with their insistence on W11 etc. There ARE other options, and people ARE adopting them(Linux, mainly), rather then having to throw out all their perfectly good W10 hardware. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9738 |
Yes, that is EXACTLY how I am managing my Windoze-only CAD. I have that running in a WIN8.1pro machine, that has NO access to the net. I'm looking at running them in a VM under Linux, but the WIN8 machine has 2GB of RAM, and only uses about 800MB running my CAD. This is still a work in progress, but....... Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
The average home user is likely not aware of anything these days. Those of us who take the intrusions and the "You will Comply" attitude of Microsoft and others with MS-Win11 and onward have had enough. I have a ton of applications that I have written that run on Windows, and there are some that have no Linux alternative so far, so I need to be able to quickly access a Windows Machine or a VM Machine without dual booting. I plan to stay on my chosen Linux Distro for now and get up to speed with the underlying OS over time. All the Arduino programming I currently do can be done in Linux of course, as can the ArmH7 and others. BTW I was pleasantly surprised at how great Thunderbird runs [flatpack] in Zorin, it leaves the windows version in the dust. Best of all I was able to import into Thunderbird from my Windows TBird application data directory, it imported all my Emails and folder layout perfectly including my Mail-To contact list, so NO need to use Windows for day to day usage  Firefox is also running way better, really enjoying the change, so much so that I may treat myself to more powerful Small computer to allow me to run a Windows VM locked down just for the few times I need it, the VM really is convenient. Well back to more reading and learning, who said you can't train (or teach) an old dog new tricks. . Edited 2025-10-30 18:18 by KeepIS NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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| dddns Guru Joined: 20/09/2024 Location: GermanyPosts: 684 |
There is a native version of VSCode, seen? Flatpak and Snap are good to transform Linux into something MS style. Mint has its own packed and supported version of thunderbird and firefox and avoids snap. If you want to test an application, flatpak or Appimage are ok but are not handled by the package manger and thus undermine the whole Principe I'm living with Linux only since 21 years now but I think the days are counted since Ubuntu 24.04, that Linux is an alternative. It will be a part of the machine which it is already, if you take it serious. Take away Linux and the world would stop immediately. |
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| PhenixRising Guru Joined: 07/11/2023 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1596 |
Hey Mike, was thinking of you yesterday and wondering how you were getting on with the wonderful ArmH7(?) |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8250 |
VScode - yes. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
I have the option to install native code and Flatpacks. I see the same bitter debate over Windows and Linux is now happening between Linus users over Distros, Flatpacks and especially Snap, along with the use of Rust and on and on. I will use whatever I feel works best for me, I have no religious affiliations with Linux. As I learn more about the OS I may change my mind, but since I have decided to go down this Linux path, this is the best way for me to start, I have not many years left so time is not on my side. I had the option of Thunderbird as a Flatpack and wanted to try it. It's blindly fast, it leaves the Windows version of Thunderbird in the dust on the same hardware. My M2 drive has insane read write speeds so I don't see a load time speed hit. UBUNTU from Canonical forced snap packages so I ditched it. Zorin18 does not and I have all options. @Mixtel90, hi Mick, I did look at it, but I specifically want to edit and compile Visual basic programs to support some Windows software, I don't think it can? I know that I need to find another simple Visual design code platform under Linux that allows me to "very quickly" make a decent looking "graphical interface" to connect to the MMbasic Micro controllers I now use, AND, make the interfaces for Linux and drop windows completely, I can also program in C as I do for the Arduino. Any suggestions are most welcome. NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
Hi, they are still running faultlessly running code 24/7 for years. I have a few spare boards and a spare 9" touch screen, but I have been so busy with building Inverters and coding the Arduino Nano for my Inverter. I really hope to get back to them soon as I have few projects in mind, so little time and so many thing I still want to do  NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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| dddns Guru Joined: 20/09/2024 Location: GermanyPosts: 684 |
If I was a programmer I'd choose Qt. |
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Revlac Guru Joined: 31/12/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1190 |
Hi Mike, have you had a go at PuTTy? probably have, I still have a few windows computers but most internet stuff I now use Mint, The old Excuse buy many people, is they wanted the windows look and feel when moving to Linux.....I don't think that is an Excuse anymore  its very straight forward for internet and Email use. Footnote added 2025-10-31 15:19 by Revlac Distro: Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy I probably should add some of these things to my Signature, when I sort it all out Cheers Aaron Off The Grid |
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| robert.rozee Guru Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 2459 |
you may like to have a look at Lazarus/FPC: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ it is a free workalike to Delphi, with applications you create able (with a little care) to be compiled from a single source into binaries for Linux (x86, x64, ARM, and others), MacOS (Intel and ARM), Windows, etc. GFXterm is written using Lazarus/FPC, as are many other applications. cheers, rob :-) |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
I don't know what version of Mint you are using but Linux Mint Cinnamon 6.4.8 version 22.2 Zara is based on Ubuntu noble, as is Zorin 18. I have everything I need running. I'm using it all day now and I prefer it over Windows 11. NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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| KeepIS Guru Joined: 13/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1926 |
Thanks rob for another to add to my list, and dddns and Mixtel90 for Qt link, I have found another five as well, a lot more then I thought and some look really good. I should have done this long ago  . Edited 2025-10-31 13:47 by KeepIS NANO Inverter: Full download - Only Hex Ver 8.1Ks |
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