Comment on W10 EoL and possibly switching to Linux (various tech questions)
Syrc@lemmy.world 6 hours agoStart up virtualbox or any virtual machine on your windows machine and test drive a few different distributions until you find one you like.
Spin up virtual box again and restore your machine into it. You may have license activation issues but you’ll have access your data. Move your data out of the VM and onto your home folder.
My plan was to, respectively, try distros from live versions and transferring files by copy-pasting everything onto a different drive and back, are there benefits in doing them the ways you suggested instead?
Also note that win11 isn’t nearly as bad as people here say.
Ehh… I tried booting that other “test” PC that I have with W11 and I got a ton of random popups, plus I really don’t like the interface and all the stuff baked in like CoPilot and Recall. I know you can disable them in some way, but if I have to go through the hassle of doing that (plus circumventing the hardware requirements), I might as well use that time to try and understand Linux a bit.
Linux has malware. It’s just different.
First time I hear this, what do you mean? Other commenters said that the permission structure prevents them, are there malware who circumvent that or do you mean like phishing/baiting you into giving permissions to a trojan?
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 8 minutes ago
You can easily search for news on Linux malware. Most recently npm was affected.
Npm is used by a lot of software, so updating your software from valid sources could easily infect your machine.
It’s also dead simple to misconfigure something on Linux, like your firewall, leaving your machine exposed to the internet. Linux doesn’t bother you nearly as much as windows does when it comes to updating and restarting. Windows used to be that way too but had to adapt to the changing threat landscape.
With VMs you can try as many at once as your system can support, with less risk than booting up on a livecd, and the ability to switch between them without having to reboot.
Moving files manually is fine.