Rather annoyed with myself for not snapping up a 16Gb mini PC at £169 yesterday on Amazon. Now £239.
However it did tip me towards a decision in principle to replace the aging (15+ years old) desktop PC I run as a media server with a simple fanless mini PC.
Obviously I'll put linux on it (probably Ubuntu server as I won't need a GUI and I've been running it at work for 2 years).
Anything I get will come with Win11. Would the group downgrade that to W10 before installing Linux ?
My reasoning being on the one day of the year I may need a windows machine, it's better to have a halfway decent version.
Ideally I'd package the existing install into a VM and use the 16Gb PC to run it.
Do they repeat black friday deals for cyber monday?
After you move the start menu to the left corner, there's not that much difference between Win10/Win11, I'd leave it, or you lose a few years of support.
I wouldn't be buying it for any support. And what value is MS "support" anyway ? Having *a* version of Windows would be for that one time you encounter a situation where you need to run a real executable. And even then WINE might just handle it.
It's better to install Linux over Windows than Windows over Linux - Linux knows how to play nicely with Windows, while Windows will trample over Linux if you install it second.
Although I have a machine that was supplied with Windows which I repartitioned and installed Linux, occasionally booting Windows. One day Windows did its updates and resolutely refused to boot thereafter, no matter how many 'repair' options I selected. So that was the end of Windows dual-booting.
Re W10/W11, install either from scratch, so you wipe out any adware/spyware that the vendor ships in the default OS image.
I'd imagine you can do most of what you want with a Windows VM from inside Linux, but installing it on a partition like that does mean you can boot it on the metal if you want to. The VM and the metal will use different drivers, but I think Windows is better these days in terms of booting the same image on different hardware.
The downside of having a Windows partition rather than a Windows file is it's more awkward to backup/snapshot/etc; one nice thing about a VM is you can take a snapshot, install $dodgy_software, try it out, then rollback to the snapshot. That's harder to do on the metal (yes you can use System Restore points for the Windows files, but not completely blow away the entire disc and go back to how it was before).
There is, I suppose, a certain advantage to being out of support. On the one hand, you're more exposed to vulnerabilities, especially if browsing, downloading software, etc. On the other, your VM doesn't spend half an hour downloading updates every time you start it. Although I think the state of Zen where it doesn't do that won't kick in for a long while, since it'll still download updates for Windows Defender and similar for a good few years. So enlightenment may have to wait.
then install your favourite Linux and the install the Win10 image in the VM? Do you have something that definitely only runs on W10?
If not, accept that Win11 is visually horrific and unpleasant to use and make a VM image of what is installed and use that if you need a Windows system. As you wont use it every day it wont matter it's horrible but will remind you why you don't use it so you can shut down your Windows VM ASAP.
Why Ubuntu? If you're not running a GUI, then it really won't be much different to the underlying Debian. There's probably more difference between Ubuntu versions that between a GUI-less Ubuntu and Debian. And Debian Stable is guaranteed upgradable to later versions indefinitely.
Reinstalling a server is a pain, it's not just a matter of throwing a few applications on a base workstation installation. Upgrading isn't always trivial, but it's definitely less work.
I've upgraded Debian 9 on x86_64 to 10 to 11 to 12 on a couple of headless VPS instances and Debian 10 to 11 to 12 on my Linux desktop without problems. I've updated Debian 11 to 12 on a pair of laptops as well.
The ability to keep upgrading versions is a big plus for me. YMMV
10 probably won't activate on an 11 key, and 10 will stop receiving security fixes etc in 2025, so I would probably stay with 11 at this point.
If you enable Hyper-V[1] on win 11, then you are kind of doing that anyway (since hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, it runs on bare metal and loads before windows - windows then runs as a client OS)
[1] included with windows unless it is a "home" version.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.