Windows made me love Linux

Before you move ahead, you might want to familiarize yourself with Linux if you don't know what it is.

 

Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash

Two years ago, there was an ordinary 12th-grade student minding his own business and preparing for the upcoming boards and engineering entrance exams. He had taken up IT as an optional fifth subject because he had a keen interest in programming. Well at school, the lab computers used Windows 10 and he wasn’t really familiar with it. He used to use an old, heavy and sluggish MacBook Pro at home and found it very unpleasant to work on.

After a short discussion, his parents decided to exchange the ageing laptop with a Windows one so that he could practice coding and install the necessary software taught to him at school. And so the next week, he opened up his first and very own Windows laptop. It was a basic laptop powered by a 7th gen Intel i3 CPU, 4GB memory and 1TB HDD storage that was supposed to be “sufficient” for everyday use.

Unfortunately, I found out that this laptop was no better than my MacBook Pro. Or should I say worse? Before I continue, I would like to point that I was a fool to exchange an Apple MacBook Pro with a basic Windows laptop. Why would anyone do that, right? Unless they consider a MacBook Pro just as a regular laptop. But I really can’t blame myself since I was very naive and ignorant about computers during that time. You can get to know about a lot of ways of speeding up an old laptop by just doing a quick Google search. I always wonder why I didn’t do that. Was it because I was in hurry to complete my school assignments? Preparing for exams that were just 3 months away? Or was I just lazy? I’ll probably never find out the answer.

Coming back to the point, my laptop was super slow, particularly when it came to booting Windows upon powering on and opening applications. I never got to know why my new laptop was slower than my dad’s 6-year-old MacBook Air, until now. Like any everyday user, I thought that the MacBook was fast just because it was made by Apple! The reason why my laptop ran slower was because of mainly two reasons- it was using an HDD for storage instead of an SSD and ran Windows 10 on it.

Just to give you a brief idea, HDDs are an older technology of storage devices that use spinning disks while SSDs are relatively newer and make use of flash technology that is similar to that seen in pen drives. Install Windows 10 on an HDD and you’ll feel like you’re using a typical 2000s computer. Unlike Linux, Windows 10 is very resource hungry and contains bloatware (unwanted software) when you buy a new laptop. Hence over time, your laptop becomes sluggish. Your memory or RAM, which stores data temporarily, also impacts your PC performance. Less is bad. Again, Windows 10 takes around 2GB of memory that is exactly half of the memory used in my laptop, making only another and meagre 2GB available for using apps. That’s not good. And so, it was very frustrating when I had to wait for a long time for my laptop to power on, launch an app and even shut down. Now you know why your PC is slow.

I had come across the name “Linux” when I was learning about operating systems at school. I literally had no idea what it was. So I did a random Google search and this event marked my arrival into the deep and vast world of Linux. As I continued reading about it, I got so addicted to the very idea of open source software that I wasted a lot of time on that. I came to know about the various advantages Linux has over Windows and found out that Linux can also be installed on a PC. It proved to be a solid alternative to Windows and macOS. “Should I uninstall Windows and install Linux on my laptop instead?” I asked myself. This question gripped my mind. And then after many debates with my mind, I finally took the brave step to install Linux.

The first Linux distro I came across was Zorin OS. When I checked out their website, I was really fascinated and impressed by it. If the website looked this good, then how good would the OS be? I don’t remember how I came to know about Zorin OS. Anyway, it looks amazing! It is super easy to use and makes your computer faster, safer and more efficient, even if you use a 10-year-old PC. So I got going, by watching Youtube tutorials and reading guides.

Of course, I faced problems when trying to install it. But I came to know about a lot of things — how to format a USB drive and create partitions, flashing the OS .iso file, boot menu key, the BIOS, Secure Boot, etc. — just by trying to install an OS. I finally installed Linux and boy, I was so happy. You know that feeling when you accomplish something on your own? I was really surprised at how smooth, responsive and snappy Zorin OS was. It wasn’t any faster thanks to the HDD, but definitely much faster than Windows 10. I continued using Zorin OS for quite some time and learning more about Linux, completely forgetting about Windows until I messed up my computer just like any Linux noob. That is another story.

Thus, Windows made me love Linux. I still use Linux (Pop OS) as my default operating system on my new laptop. I’ve also got Windows 10 installed only to play games or use MS Office. I think you should try out Linux too — a way to breathe new life on your ageing laptop.