I can well believe all of this. At the moment, however, things are acceptable.
I have set my working hours for as long as the system allows during the day and my non-working hours are set as something like 2am to 8am, if I recall. Therefore, Windows Updates will only download themselves between the latter hours when the computer is turned off. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine that Microsoft will permit this situation to continue indefinitely!
If things become really too bad, I shall migrate to Linux on my new(er) laptop and use my old W7 laptop for Photoshop - without any internet connection.
If I find any restriction on using the internet on my Linux laptop for any reason, I am hopeful that if Chrome and Google are not permitted unless I have Windows, perhaps other options might be available on Linux.
If all the big businesses attempt to take over the world, as you suggest, I am hopeful that there will still be smaller companies (like Linux) which will oppose them and offer free use of their programmes, even with a reasonably priced one-off payment.
The default browser that comes with Linux Mint is Firefox. Chrome can be installed once the Linux Mint installation is complete and running by following the instructions in the page linked to below…
In the page are also instructions on how to install Chromium, the open source browser that Google Chrome is based on. You might prefer this if wanting to get away from Google Chrome as well as Windows. Chromium will work just the same as Google Chrome.
Don’t worry about the ‘terminal’ part of the instructions for installing Chromium. I don’t think you’d need to go through all that because Chromium is in Linux Mint’s Software Manager and ready to install.
If preferring to use Google Chrome, scroll down the page a bit to the ‘Installing Google Chrome’ section. Again I don’t think you need worry about the ‘terminal’ part because double-clicking the ‘deb’ package should install a working copy of Google Chrome.
About updates: Linux Mint gets them too and in my experience, possibly more than Windows does. However, where you don’t trust Windows updates, I think you can trust those from Linux Mint. They won’t be forced on you but it’s an OS that is being honed and improved all the time and I think updates are best accepted.
Did you know that, to a limited degree, you can run Linux Mint from a USB stick or CD before installing it and without disturbing the current Windows OS?
Files are put onto a CD or USB stick and then boot up using it. When Linux Mint starts, it will require your wi-fi password (if that’s how the computer is connected to the Internet) and then you can try it out. Just don’t click on the ‘Install Linux Mint’ button sitting on the Desktop or it will start the installation procedure for putting Linux Mint on your hard drive (but not without giving warnings).
Instructions on how to make a bootable Linux Mint USB stick are given in the page linked to below…
I’d like to try Linux (preferably Mint, from what I’ve heard), using a USB stick. I’ll let you know what I think when I’ve had time to have a proper look at it.
Incidentally and off-topic (sorry!) I ran Malwarebytes this morning and found that, suddenly, Chrome was very slow to load and, worse, it wouldn’t open any YouTube videos. Not having any idea why, I turned off the computer and re-started. It seems to be OK now.
I’ve finally found a USB stick (8Gb), deleted the contents and downloaded the Linux Mint software following the instructions in your link above.
This took a little time, but eventually they were downloaded and extracted.
The next job was to try to boot from the USB stick. I tried the usual methods: pressing f12 at start up, but it booted to Windows 10. I also tried the same with f2, f10 and f11, but all loaded Windows as normal.
I then tried to boot from USB using Change Advanced Start-Up Options in Settings, but this loaded a blank Windows screen (with none of my settings, etc.), so I shut down and loaded W10 again as normal.
I don’t know why this shouldn’t work, but I’ll have another look at it later. Perhaps I missed something.
Thanks.
I’ll download the files from the above.
However, the utility you provide says Ubuntu. Does this all change automatically with the Mint version?
Do I need to click one of the UK ‘download mirrors’, whatever they are?
Click the select button on Rufus (not the drop-down arrow) and Windows File Explorer should open.
Go to where the Linux download ((ISO) is, select it and click ‘Open’ in the Window (or double-click the ISO file).
You should now see the ISO in Rufus’s ‘Device’ bar and the ‘Volume Label’ bar.
The ‘START’ button should spring into life
Click it to start the format and creation of files on the USB stick.
The result is a Linux bootable USB stick that can be used to boot up the computer.
I’m not sure which F button you’d need to press on your computer for the boot menu to appear as it starts but on my laptop it’s F9. When the Boot Menu is showing, choose the USB stick.
It might be worth changing the USB being used. I have a Sandisk 16Gb thumb drive that Windows doesn’t recognise as a drive even though it recognises it as a USB device ie Explorer doesn’t automatically open which is the default action for such drives.
However Windows Explorer can view, transfer, delete etc the files on it, don’t know why this is so because other drives by the same manufacturer bought both before and after this model are fine (I have three of this type).
