this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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My 1st desktop had Windows 95 on it. It worked OK. A few years later, I bought a laptop pc with WindowsME (Millennium Edition), and it became the last Windows product I've owned. A work colleague installed Windows 2000 on that laptop, and it worked for a couple months, until I got my "blue screen of death."
At that time, they started selling the ePC notebooks, available with WindowsXP or Linux (the XanderOS) I stepped out of my comfort zone, and got the XanderOS variant, and have had Linux computers since. I'm currently using Mint on an old Panasonic CF-30, and Ubuntu on 2 laptops built by System 76.
My wife likes Mac, but I'm not a fan. My kids get a pretty rounded experience, between using their moms Mac, their dads 2 variants of Linux, and their Chromebooks at school.
That's all well and good, what happens to your kids when they can't tick the Windows and MSOffice boxes on job applications?
I'm not having a go at you, I'll assume you've taught your kids how to approach the new and unknown in the IT fields, but if they have limited or zero experience with Microsoft products, they'll be at a disadvantage.
Oh, I don't discourage them from using/learning Microsoft products at all - they just don't happen to be in our home, because as consumers, my wife and I don't spend our money in Microsofts direction. While I can't say it with accuracy anymore, because it's been 20 years since my switch, one of the selling points with the Linux distributions was that some of them looked and felt like either Mac or Windows. My Ubuntu distribution looks pretty similar to my wife's Mac, and the initial installation of Linux Mint, several years ago was made to look and feel like Windows XP. Honestly, the last time I touched Windows was before retiring from the US Navy, where the Submarine LAN was run on Windown NT - but I retired in 2009.
If my kids came home with a Windows PC, or the cheaper option, wanted to turn one of my laptops into a dual-boot machine, I wouldn't care...more exposure to (that bad word) diversity in operating systems. I don't think they're missing out on not having Microsoft in our home though. Microsoft Word in the Tux world is Open Office, Microsofts Excel is Calc, etc....if you know one, you'll be able to work on the other.