Windows 10: W9 Cloud Based or Subscription only ?

I haven't played around with the newer distros designed to feel familiar to Windows users. But in the early 2000s I messed around with several releases of Slackware, Red Hat and a few of the Debian based distros.

Esp. with Slackware I used to tell people the main difference was, with Linux it may take me a day, a week, or more to correctly set up a new application. With Windows I double click the installer. With Linux once the application is correctly configured, it's nearly bullet proof. With Windows you keep tweaking it and fixing it forever. *Smile

But the Debian based distros using apt-get, the setup is much quicker now. Also most distros boot to an X window manager at the end of install. With early Slackware I had to download the X libraries and configure them using a book and example config files, to get it to load.

Yes you can compile custom kernels and load different modules on startup etc..

But the thing that made me uncomfortable, coming from Dos/Windows, were the text editors. The key bindings and usage paradigms are radically different. I used to type text files using kylix compiler IDE just because it had the same key bindings as the Window Delphi IDE.

But Linux editors are very powerful. I'm convinced the way to get people accustomed to Linux is to teach them computer text editing on vi and Emacs as their first text editors. Then they won't miss the old Dos/Windows key bindings.

I think what may give the impression that Linux is flaky are Window Managers that try to recreate the Control Panel Applets. Many I tried were flaky. They are just front ends that make changes to the /etc startup files that are still there. If you learn to configure Linux with the shell scripts many distros are rock solid. But there is learning curve coming from Windows.

I would have to try several of the new distros before forming any solid opinion. But often I get the impression Windows users expect things to be the same except maybe for the color scheme, once they are in the Linux Window Manager. But on other forums I know people who say there are solid distros of the new variety.

In any case my best advice would be use a Debian based distro. The package tool is nearly flawless compared to others I've tried. Red Hat had a package tool,rpm, but it seemed like people didn't agree what directories should be "standard" requiring environment variables to override the application's defaults. It seems like with Debian based everyone is in agreement on the directory structure. Installs don't require tweaking. Much less frustrating to add applications.