About 3 months ago, I formatted the boot drive of my main PC where Windows 10 had been running for 2 years,and installed Ubuntu LTS 16.04.3. Why? On top of the built-in "spying" feature, I was finally fed up with Microsoft's tedious, monthly update that slowly ate up my SSD space and rendered the OS to be bloated and slow. I used to try Ubuntu on and off since about 8 years ago with pretty good impression of it, so I decided that it's time for me embrace Linux/Ubuntu as the main desktop OS.
I have a 120GB Toshiba MLC SATA SSD as the boot drive. A vanilla Windows 10 install takes up ~20GB of disk space. By the time I have Microsoft Office and some common applications (Acrobat, Photoshop etc), ~35GB is occupied. Each month >1GB more of disk space was occupied due to Windows/Office update. Yes I know I could clean up the temp update files, but that'll be another 15-30 minutes depending on hardware configurations. Most importantly, the Windows 10 OS became more and more unstable over time.
So after I experienced a couple of "bork Tuesday" in late 2017, I fired up Ubuntu 16.04.3 installer boot UFD, the most recent point release of the LTS version of Ubuntu and wiped Windows 10 out of my SSD. A vanilla Ubuntu x64 only took up less than 8GB of disk space. And that was when LibreOffice and GIMP (an open source photo editing program) were installed. When other common programs were also loaded, a total of 9.6GB was used (figure below).
It took me less than two hours to wipe out Windows 10, install Ubuntu and common programs, and optimize the system to make a light and responsive Ubuntu 16.04 LTS that was ready to fly. Another note: Ubuntu uses configuration files (mostly text files) to mange the OS/Software configuration information, as compared to the centrally managed Windows Registry. This effectively avoided the kind of slowness over time caused by corruption and fragmentation of the Registry in Windows.
I am an average dude with no professional IT training experience. Yet I find more comfort using Ubuntu in everyday computing activities as compared to the days when I used Windows 10. So yeah, it's true that Linux desktop today is vastly different from the geeky, difficult to use Linux OS 10 years ago, thanks to the efforts of many parties, especially Canonical who introduced Ubuntu, the Linux for human beings. If an average dude like myself can find peace and comfort in using it, I am sure you can also free yourself from the spying eyes of Microsoft with minimal efforts, if you wish.
This blog is dedicated to documenting and sharing my way of tweaking Linux/Ubuntu and Windows 10 for everyday computing, typically in a home environment. You may find my tricks useful in helping you transition to Linux. Occasionally, I will also share tricks to make efficient use of Windows 10. After all, Windows is the dominating desktop OS, and I have to turn to Windows 10 to run certain programs that only have Windows versions. So it's a good idea to keep a spare Windows 10 PC if you wouldn't bother running a Windows 10 virtual machine.
No comments:
Post a Comment