Hi Rosika
It’s mainly been former windows computers everything from vista, xp, 7 and 8… Even had very old 95 and 98.
Over 300 machines done but I did stop counting a few years back.
My own machine in a Mac from 2011 which moved from leopard to mint as not possible to upgrade Mac system anymore and it has 12 GB memory runs a dream although only on 32 bit mate 19.
Just about to start a 2016 Mac which only has 4 GB memory and not upgradable. I have reinstalled the Mac system but it’s just too slow for art work and Photoshop so mint with gimp is the answer. Only issue is built in WiFi card not recognised but happy with external WiFi key, no big deal will find a solution after.
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Thanks, Paul, for sharing this information 
.
Very interesting indeed.
Wow, that´s impressive, to say the least. 
Your own machine sporting 12 GB of RAM is certainly well equipped.
You must have an incredible amount of practical expertise after doing so many conversions.
Thanks again and many greetings from Rosika 
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Those who can do
Those who can’t do teach
Those who cannot teach, teach teachers
Sadly I have done all of these things.
The real answer is when you find a solution stop looking for other answers, hence Linux mint gave me the solution I needed hence I stuck with it.
Now, every time I get a windows repair finished I say that’s the last one I do. What a pain, took too long, difficult to solve …
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Those who cannot teach teachers, manage. 
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Rescue/Single mode on RPM based distros, not 100% sure if it’s “busybox”, I think it is, does have vi / vim…
Some other “nastiness” (IMHO) on Debian based distros, the “default” editor is nano (e.g. visudo - which is kinda lame, 'cause visudo is mnenomic for “vi sudoers”). Sure - you can get around that with via “export EDITOR=vi” - but we shouldn’t have to! I often “echo EDITOR=vi >> /etc/environment” on a new build of a debian / Ubuntu based install - the first time you run “crontab -e” it does have the decency to ask you which editor, that’s nice, why couldn’t they do that with visudo?
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So am I the only person who is NOT a Windows refugee? … I came from BSD and before that from Berkeley Unix and before that from mainframes.
I did have Win around at some stages but never really used it . Had more use for DOS or CP/M than Win. Never touched a Mac.
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Lucky you. I’ve had to support them a bit, but have never really used one for a job.
In fact a neighbor has an issue maybe someone can suggest a solution for. He uses an older Mac with Google Chrome. He maintains websites for about a dozen of his customers. As the SSL certs have been expiring we’ve been using Let’s Encrypt instead of GoDaddy or Network Solutions. Last week, when we did one of those, he found his Mac running Chrome doesn’t trust the cert. I think Safari did. Every other device we tried worked fine from Windows desktop to Android mobile and Firefox to Edge and Chrome.
He checked for an upgrade to Chrome, but it looks like there is not a newer version of Chrome for his version of the OS and I’m not sure what that version is exactly. Any magic solutions?
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I suspect this relates to root cert expiration.
If that’s the case, you should somehow update the preinstalled root certs. I don’t know how to dovthat on a mac.
I think I just have a deep suspicion of all things “corporate”. Much of Microsoft’s behaviour made me feel like I wasn’t in control of my machine, and that I was also becoming the product rather than the customer. I also didn’t like the resource hungriness, and abject security, inherent in Windows (I understand the latter has now improved markedly).
I’d dabbled with installing Linux way back when, but found it just didn’t have enough software available to make it a viable replacement for Windows. This has changed, and when I next installed Linux I found the gap between what was available, and what I needed, had narrowed considerably. So much so that I could make Linux my preferred OS, and just use Windows for the relatively small number of tasks that were still difficult on Linux.
The excellent Virtual Box opened up the option of keeping a Windows VM for those tasks, as an alternative to using a bare metal Windows OS. Indeed, with the sole exception of games, I found I had no use for a bare metal Windows OS at all.
I presently have 4 bootable OS’s on my main machine - 3 Linux (2 Arch, 1 Mint), and Windows 10. My machine meets the requirements for upgrading to Windows 11, but I haven’t done that. I literally cannot remember the last time I booted into Windows 10 for any reason other than to do an update.
As someone who builds their own PC, I’m fairly certain that Windows will not be featuring in the next one.
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I had the same issue! It turned out that the amdgpu module which supported the new card wasn’t present in kernels prior to about 5.14 (I forget the exact number). The clue for me was that my Arch installation had no issue with the card, but Mint didn’t recognise it. After a bit of research, simply upgrading to a newer kernel in Mint solved the problem immediately.
Yes, I had that . Had to discard Debian ( I could not get a new enough kernel even with backports), so I went to MX"ahs" edition.
I have MX and Void, you have Mint and Arch. I think they are good combinations… something stable and something leading edge… best of both worlds.
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A good combination indeed, though I cheat a bit with Arch by using the LTS kernel - still well ahead of most distros, but not quite so bleeding edge. It still gets updated fairly regularly, but I don’t get a broken system if I forget to do an upgrade for 4 weeks.
I think it is the business world that causes Microsoft to behave like that.
Home users and the scientific world are different.
IBM learnt that years ago and even built different computers and supplied different software to the two worlds. All Microsoft does is feed home users a cutdown version.
Last year I briefly switched jobs, new job was 100% remote with all my bosses located on the East Coast - anyway - they said they’d ship me a MacBook Pro, but instead I got a shonky i3 MacBook air with a piddling 8 GB of RAM and 2 cores/2 threads running I think MacOS 11 (and to top that off - they sent the WRONG powerbrick!). Now - 8 GB is kinda okay (my personal MBP M1 only has 8 GB RAM and it’s mostly fine) - but those 4 virtual cores were barely capable of doing anything (my MBP M1 has 8 arm64 cores).
Anyway - while they were getting my security clearance sorted out - they allocated me to a state government (not in my state) account, and I had to use Citrix - and it was an awful undermaintained shonky version of Citrix - and I NEVER got any downloadable Citrix client for MacOS to work due to certificates…
I tried creating a REL7 VM, a REL8 VM, a Windows 10 VM (all this on a shonky little MacBook Air)!
Yeah I could have tried on a better computer - but - my employment contract stipulated I could only use my employer’s equipment to connect to their customers.
Here’s how I eventually connected to that Citrix environment : I had to “roll” (I had a license through my empoyer) a VMware Fusion VM running MacOS 10.x to get the old certs this SHONKY Citrix server “farm” require Citrix clients (and some Citrix ICA client from 2017 or thereabouts) to use… What a joke!
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Tell me if I got it right.
This Citrix rubbish allows you to access a Win desktop remotely, and it runs in any computer/OS. It runs as a VM in your machine. I assume there is some citrix server at the remote end.
So why is that so difficult?
TLS and SSL - that’s why… Deprecated cert chains that some shonky IT departments still host on their ailing legacy platforms… Operating system vendors patched their stuff because those cert chains were suspect and vulnerable.
Yeah - Citrix started off with Terminal servers for OS/2 and Windows NT 3.x - I think there were IBM ATM’s running OS/2 terminals…
Microsoft licensed their terminal software from Citrix and some versions of Windows NT 4 had terminal services, and RDP became “de rigeur” on Windows NT (2000, XP onwards) systems - Citrix actually created RDP and sold it to Microsoft.
Citrix also had a hypervisor, XEN, which they opensourced (Amazon EC2 and Oracle VM for x86 use XEN).
Citrix mostly runs on VMware “farms” hosting VDIs (Virtual Desktop Images) and usually load balanced using Netscalers or F5s or the like… There’s not much Citrix XEN around these days, most people are running their Citrix VDI on VMware “clusters”. I think it’s possible on HyperV too (seem to remember one customer had this)…
One of my customers doesn’t use Citrix, they run VDI’s on VMware Horizon (which also has a range of cross platform clients, e.g. for Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS - AND - Linux!).
It’s all that “thin client” stuff - hence why most vendors of these sort of products have Linux clients, because many thin client hardware solutions boot Linux off NVRAM or some other small storage… Somewhere along the way - hardware Thin Clients priced themselves out of the market, when you could get a low price low power low end laptop for 1/2 the price of a thin client (that didn’t come with a screen!).
Sun Microsystems had a REALLY neat “schmick” thin client solution, SunBlade 100 “JavaStation” - I actually have one (it’s not working - as I don’t have the infrastructure backend - they used a low power version of Sparc CPU). They had a smartcard slot, and you could take your smart card from e.g. some Sun office in California, inserted in a SunBlack Javastation in Dublin, and get the same desktop!
I quite like the principle behind “thin client” but it becomes moot when you have to host a VM running a Legacy OS just to run a thin client!
Three years ago I was running one of my NTC CHIP (single armhf core running Jessie) computers to display a Citrix desktop for a customer of mine - it was perfectly usable… Citrix make a point of having Linux arm binaries for Citrix client - as quite a few thin client vendors use arm CPUs…
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That is just a bit of hardware intelligence to add to your screen. Bit like an X terminal.
It seems to be a product created to have something extra to sell, rather than filling a genuine need. Why nit just use a normal computer.?
Because with a “Thin Client” central IT departments have full control and management of the “User Experience”… I actually quite like the idea myself… **
I use Citrix client for two of my customers - one of them - it’s published apps on a “portal page” over HTTPS (e.g. I double click on the File Explorer icon in Brave browser, and it fires up via Citrix the Windows application on my Mac or Linux desktop - I then use this to find the folder when I plonked MobaXterm.exe portabl).
The other one I get a full Windows 10 “locked down” desktop - which - seems bizarre, but I then use that Citrix session to fire up an RDP session to an “admin” windows server that has the software I need (mostly MobaXterm for SSH’ing to UNIX and Linux servers). That Windows 10 Citrix desktop actually as a copy of MobaXterm, but it’s like 10+ years old and crashes immediately anyway…
BOTH above Citrix solutions use MFA (soft tokens running on Android) for access…
** having said that - I’d VASTLY prefer if I could just SSH directly (or indirectly via tunnels) to the Linux servers I have to support. I mostly do this too (for one customer), but some garbage my current employer has on their garbage SOE/MOE MacOS big brother control system, has completely broken Azure P2S VPN connectivity - so - when I want to work this way - I VPN using my personal MacBook and Azure P2S VPN client (apart from things like Falcon Crowdstrike and InfoBlox [which enforce a “dummy” DNS resolver 127.0.0.2 entry] on the work MacBook - they’re identical MacOS versions). Seriously, some IT departments running SOE/MOE enforcement, essentially convert these issued devices into BRICKS they’re so locked down - there’s not much use for them! However I can use this one for Citrix, and I use it for MS Outlook and MS Teams clients (I can run both anywhere else, but I have to MFA every 12 hours or so and that’s a PITA)… These same ignorant IT deparments regularly pat themselves on the back for what a good job they’re doing preventing their colleagues doing anything MEANINGFUL with these devices… I tried one of their Windows 10 devices before I go the MacBook, and they’re 10,000X more restrictive and locked down than MacOS, at least I can insall and run Synergy KVM client on MacOS, I was unable to do that on Windows 10, and when I logged a ticket to let me install it - they just said “No!” - and they call that “Service Delivery”… Basically, when I’m WFH - if a device WON’T let me share the single keyboard and mouse I have on my desk - I WILL NOT USE IT!
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I can understand people wanting to secure data… with all the leakages lately.
Do they have to do it by locking down the OS? Cant data access be a separate issue from logging in?.. I know, clever people can make an OS do anything, but cant the data be isolated from the OS?
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The biggest reason for my switch is overall security. The ease of installing and updating software (apt, flatpak, snap, etc) is a very close second - I mean with one bash alias I can update all the packages on my system and remove old ones.
alias update="sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade && sudo snap refresh && sudo flatpak update && sudo apt autoremove && sudo /home/dan/Scripts/remove-old-snaps.sh"
My third reason is I can’t stand Microsoft constantly trying to shove their software down my throat on Windows. I happen to like the Edge browser and even have the flatpak installed on Ubuntu. I don’t appreciate MS changing the default browser on it’s own after major feature updates, trying to scare users by basically saying other browsers may be dangerous, and asking for double confirmation upon intentionally trying to change the default browser. Windows doesn’t do that for another other software!
My third reason is closely related to the second. Stop installing junk apps like Candy Crush, Disney, etc from the MS Store – especially with a Pro license. I can maybe buy the ‘we’re just trying to be helpful’ argument for home licenses but Pro licensees don’t need MS’s “help” by installing sponsored apps.
Linux is pretty fun for me too. I love tinkering and figuring things out. Just switching desktop environments opens up a whole new set of tips and tricks to learn.
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