Our home windows laptop died over a year ago, and was replaced by a Chromebook, which has been great and fulfilled most needs, but for those it couldn’t, I had a Windows based laptop for work. I handed that back a few months ago, and have been using a Raspberry Pi 4b (4Gb version) as my main desktop.
This has been going ok, although has been frustrating at times. As a long time Linux user, I have no problems with the command line for server based tasks, but I have never really needed to use Linux as a desktop replacement. It’s ok, but a little clunky in places and often needs several different tools or utilities to achieve what you want to achieve instead of one.
This was until I needed to do a bit of graphics editing for a project I was working on for someone. I went through countless android apps on the Chromebook trying to find something suitable, but they all seemed restricted in some way. Trying to get WINE running was painful, and a non starter on the Chromebook. I then turned to Gimp on the RPi and while I know it’s a very powerful tool, its also quite complicated having never used it, and would have needed a bit of time to get used to how it worked, unfortunately I needed a quick solution.
Therefore I had to fall back to an old favourite, MS Paint(brush). Something I’ve been using since my early days of computing and know exactly how it works and what it can do. I know it’s not big or clever but I took the decision to stand up a Windows machine.
My first thought was to stand up a cloud based VM, somewhere like AWS or Azure, but then I remembered about a box sat gathering dust in my study. A shuttle XS35 from 2010, previously used as a CentOS based media server, it was now obsolete. Perhaps I could breathe new life into this for a more permanent solution, in case the need to windoze ever arose again, or maybe for my daughter, now she is starting to cut her teeth with computing and programming.
I still had a Windows 7 install disk, I chose the 32-bit version due to the shuttles 2Gb of RAM (I mean my phone has more memory nowadays). The installation chugged through and finally got me to the familiar windows GUI, where I could fire up paint and do what I needed to do, quickly.
So where am I now, obviously sat here installing updates and patches, after the upgrade to Windows 10 (surprisingly still able to upgrade for free, using the media creation tool), obviously needed in the modern IT world, but something I didn’t miss when using the Chromebook or RPi.