Win10 EoL...

[Tom David]

[Opinions please] Win10 user planning a move to Lx before EoL in October. Research and suggestions point to Fedora or Mint distro… opinions please. My biggest concern at this point is 15+ years of notes on MS OneNote and have not been successful moving to Joplin. Any suggestions on ‘how to’?

Currently in Gainesville, hoping to make a JaxLUG meeting soon. Thanks you, in advance, for any response at your convenience.

[Zack Dye]

Hello Tom,

Glad you are finally making the jump to Linux. For your first distro, if you have not already, install Virtual box and spin up some VM and "play around" with different flavors. If you have any networking behind your experience Proxmox is a great choice for distro hopping and self hosting.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/

I recommend Debian but Mint and Fedora are great as well.

As far as your notes, the open source world as multiple options(as with everything) depending on how you have your OneNote set up and how you use them, whether or not its just personal notes or if you share them or allow others access to them? All these factors will change what solution you use.

A quick tool

https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-onenote/

Obsidian (node based)

https://obsidian.md/

Bookstack (self hosted webserver but kinda onenote like UI) 

https://www.bookstackapp.com/

I personally use dukowiki (self-hosted webserver)(literally just a wiki)

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

mostly because I take notes in regular plain text files so its easy to copy, paste, edit, upload and share etc.

Not all platforms will like your OneNote export and might not import it correctly. Depending on how extensive your 15+ years of notes are this may or may not even be an issue. 

As far as breaking it down into a "how to" largely depends on how you have structured your notes and how much note taking you have done, its detail, how often its used and how much you want to keep.

I dont know you or your technical background, but the first culture shock you are going to find in the open source world from windows. EVERYONE DOES IT DIFFERENT. Its about optimizing whats efficient and comfortable for you. I know thats not really helpful in the beginning steps of transitioning over to linux

[Robert Mckennon]

Tom, sorry nobody replied!  This list IS still active!  I didn't reply because I don't have an alternative to Notes in Linux.  I actually love Notes and use it every day at work.  But because I spend 9+ hours on Windows every weekday, I'm not too motivated to hop onto my slackware box after work.  I was hoping to see you at our meeting tonight, but hopefully next month?

Rob

On Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 19:31 Tom David <tomd...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Opinions please] Win10 user planning a move to Lx before EoL in October. Research and suggestions point to Fedora or Mint distro… opinions please. My biggest concern at this point is 15+ years of notes on MS OneNote and have not been successful moving to Joplin. Any suggestions on ‘how to’?

Currently in Gainesville, hoping to make a JaxLUG meeting soon. Thanks you, in advance, for any response at your convenience.

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[TomDavid]

Thank you for your response, Zake.

Your recommendation of Debian is highlighted on my original list of 10 distros along with Mint and Fedora.

OneNote is personal for me; not shared. One of the alternatives you suggested will probably work for me.

I am going to stay with Win10 through the summer. I have some projects to complete and don't want to jump in the 'deep end' yet. That said, what is your suggestion to start looking at the UI and some details for Debian, Mint, and Fedora?

Thanks again for your response.

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[Zack Dye]

A great place to start for looking at what UI and experience you want is r/unixporn on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?t=all

It will show you some of whats possible.

However, its important to understand Linux is just a kernel and you user experience largely comes form the desktop environment (DE) you use and customize ("rice"). You can customize any DE, some are more flexible than others. Important to note that you are never stuck with any DE or UI in Linux. You always have the option to change and Customize ("rice") your experience. Over the summer spin up some VMs (Virtual Machine) and play around and find what you like.

When you first install most distros, they will give you a selection of different Desktop Environments (DE). Most people select based how "Heavy or Bloated" a DE is, meaning how much RAM and CPU it uses. Normally everyone wants "minimal bloat". a "lightweight distro" as they call it.

Common selections include:

XFCE: light weight

Cinnamon(linux Mint): a little heavy but more polished

This will be a more "Windows like" experience

 

Enlightenment: Every now and again youll come across DE like this one that try to create a more unique experience or push the limits or maximize/minimize certain things. Be lightweight as possible, fast as possible or have all the bells and whistles.

KDE: This falls into the camp of "all the bells and whistles" Tries to be very user friendly very easy to customize ("rice")

Then you have Window Managers (WM): like i3, DWM, BSPW, QTILE. I do use DWM but I dont recommend them for new Linux users. But your are going to run into them so you need to be aware of them. They are not full DE and they dont include the tools and applications that come with DE. You normally have to install it all yourself. All DE have window managers (they are the window boxes that pop up when you open applications). but not all WM come with DE.

Hope this helps. You can reach out to me directly at zdye...@gmail.com. You can always reach out to any of us if you have questions or hit road blocks.

[TomDavid]

Thanks, Zake.

Like I said earlier, I'm working on some projects this summer so the next few months will be devoted to 'newbie' questions and research. I look forward to gaining knowledge from you and the JaxLUG.

To start, what is "Rice" :-)?

To be clear, can I load a VM on Win10 to review distros, and DE? I have not read the details of your message yet so the answer may be in there.

I developed a software program for Florida attorneys in 2000/2001 so I'm not completely illiterate, BUT that was a long time ago and I did not write the code - C++ :-).

At some point I will want to talk about hardware. Currently using a Dell 7000 laptop, Intel i7, 12GB RAM, 512GB SS drive. It works well for my purposes, but would probably increase RAM. I would prefer a tower/mini-tower, but not easy to travel with.

Thanks again. Hopefully my elementary questions are easy to answer and don't take up too much of your time.

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[Tim Holloway]

Congratulations on your bravery.

Linux Mint seems to be a popular entry point these days, although a lot of people claim to eventually "outgrow" it. I've not tried Mint, so I'm not sure what their issues are.

I've been runnng Fedora since before there was a Fedora (or RHEL). Although a lot of what I do for lightweight work is done on a Raspberry Pi under the Raspberry  Pi OS (a Debian-tye OS).

So I only use my full desktop machine for heavy-duty stuff, which includes FreeCAD and most software development (Eclipse and Android Studio). The current machine seems to strain a bit under 24GB RAM and the 4th expansion slot is broken, so I may swap boxes, since 32G worked well, I do keep a lot of stuff active at one time.

To get started, the easiest thing is to download bootable thumb-drive images and try them and see what you like. Most popular distros will run a "live drive" which will not tamper with your existing Windows, with the option to install to your hard drive if you want a permanent installation (the thumb drive is a bit slow as an OS disk).

You can also create a VM using a distro ISO file as the image for a virtual CD/DVD to boot/install from. I recommend 15GB for the core OS virtual disk. You can expand it or add other virtual disks later.

You're in luck with Joplin. I use Joplin because I can host my sync server locally without donating my private data to a third party. I've got it on my desktop, most portable devices and even on some of my servers, which are non-GUI machines (text-mode Joplin is a real challenge!) The server copy is because I keep my system knowledge base in Joplin and should a catstrophe take everything down, the instructions for recovering will still be available on that machine.

Incidentally, for lightweight reminders I also use gnote (Post-IT hyperlinked notes) and TaskWarrior (text-mode to-do lists.

You mentioned an app in C++. Naturally, a Windows GUI app cannot compile and run as-is directly under Linux, since Linux has a completely different GUI API. Wine is one solution, but there are also others, though they require extensive source-code modification. For truly portable code, Java really can be "write-once/run-anywhere" and Python can be pretty portable. In large part, however, web-based apps are overtaking native desktop GUIS. with Java/Spring Boot and Node/JS  (JavaScript) being popular universal platforms.

  Best Regards,

      Tim

On Mon, 2025-03-17 at 16:31 -0700, Tom David wrote:

[Opinions please] Win10 user planning a move to Lx before EoL in October. Research and suggestions point to Fedora or Mint distro… opinions please. My biggest concern at this point is 15+ years of notes on MS OneNote and have not been successful moving to Joplin. Any suggestions on ‘how to’?

Currently in Gainesville, hoping to make a JaxLUG meeting soon. Thanks you, in advance, for any response at your convenience.

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[TomDavid]

Thanks Tim, good stuff.

C++ is in the rear-view mirror. I don't plan any new development; just spending some 'volunteer-time' with business intelligence, data analytics, etc. these days.

I will try the bootable flash-drive idea to review some distros. Mint might be a good start because I'm not doing any heavy processing now. Mostly just 10-15 open tabs doing research. But, I have had Fedora suggested more than once, as well as Debian. Whatever looks good will probably be a starting point.

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[Zack Dye]

All questions are welcome.

I'm going to go ahead in address them in order.

"Rice" / "Ricing" is an internet slang term used to describe the customization, UX, Cosmetic look, aesthetics of the DE.

For VMs on WIndows 10, yes you can spin them up. I'm going to assume you have windows 10 home edition installed on your computer. In which case you'll need to install Virutalbox by Oracle to spin up VMs on your desktop. Here are some guides.

How to get virtualbox

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Heres how to spin up VMs with virtualbox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvdnQX9UkMY

If you have windows pro you might be able to just enable hyper-v in "Turn Windows features on or off," scroll down to hyper-v and enable it and reboot.

How to create hyper-v Linux VM

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-run-linux-distros-windows-10-using-hyper-v

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[TomDavid]

Thank you again. Yes, Win10 Home.

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[Tim Holloway]

Travel PCs that aren't laptops (I don't like laptop keyboards or touchpads). There's a Raspberry Pi model where the PC is built into the keyboard. I think it's the 400 and maybe Pi 5 is 500. This is OK for light office work. As I said, I am using the credit card-sized Pi 4 as my primary desktop right now, but it's not in a case, so a bit untidy for travel. Some Pi cases can screw onto the back of a monitor, by the way.

Another option I've enjoyed is picking up used Del Optiplex Micro Form Factor units on EBay. For around $200, the 7050 is a little larger than a book (about 12x12x2 inches), is lightweight and has all the essentials, from Ethernet jack, lots of USB ports, HDMI video and built-in WiFi/Bluetooth. Holds 1 2-1/2 inch disk and one M.2 SSD.  Up to 32GB of RAM. I've been buying these as storage nodes for my distributed filesystem, since they don't consume much power or spacel

So a travel kit would be something like that, plus monitor, mouse and keyboard (bluetooth should work).

   Tim

[Tom David]

Thank you, Tim.

Good info detail. Next steps for me is to take a look at some DE starting with Debian, Mint, & Fedora. Thinking about downloading VM to review the DEs, but your thumb drive idea ( "To get started, the easiest thing is to download bootable thumb-drive images...") seems like a good alternative.

Where can I download those 'bootable' images?

Joplin seems like the best alternative to OneNote so far... except I will need their cloud account to sync between my desktop and mobile.

My developing days are in the 'rear-view' now. Although I have a dozen or so open tab doing research, most of my work is with desktop office programs (LibreOffice) and database (Airtable) work. So, a Raspberry machine may do just fine. Looking into that now. My current setup is a Win10 Home O/S on a Dell 7000 laptop connected to a powered docking station which supports dual-monitors, speakers, camera, keyboard, and 2 printers; all USB-A or C (except one wireless printer). All hardware suggestions appreciated.

Thanks again.

TomDavid

[Tim Holloway]

No problem, Tom.

I've been on Fedora since before it was Fedora thanks to a Linux book I bought ages ago that came with a Red Hat CD in the back. Originally I ran the 2-floppy slackware distro, but that's no longer a good option. In fact, I'm not sure what state slackware is in any more.

You can get the ISO image - and instructions on how to download Fedora to a thumb drive off the Fedora website. In fact, I made one just the other day that I used to boot a computer that was being hardware tested and had no OS disk in it.

Joplin doesn't require registering with an "official" Joplin sync server. I host my own server using WebDAV, but I think it also can sync with other cloud providers.

 

  Regards,

    Tim

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[Tom David]

Good to know about Joplin server. Thx.