Hi there. Just got clearance to renew our church Multimedia PC and I have a nice i5 box with 8GB RAM and a Radeon graphics card coming from Dell. I have an old Samsung EVO 120GB SSD that I'm going to throw into it as my boot drive for speed.
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On the old PC that's getting retired I had Win 7 (upgraded to Win 10) with OLP and a secondary partition with Linux Mint 15 and the Ubuntu release of OLP.
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My theory was that if Windows ever went belly up at a crucial moment I could reboot into Linux and still run the service without anyone ever being any the wiser. In the end I only had cause to do this 3 times in the last 4-5 years but I wasn't half glad of the option when I did need it.
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Most recently I used it 2 weeks ago when Win 10 insisted it was going to start installing updates 3 mins before the start of the Sunday service.
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I had been thinking of imaging the Dell's Win 10 install onto the SSD and then repartitioning the HDD to install the latest Mint release but I am now thinking that Win 10's forced updates are going to become an increasingly regular pain (the PC is normally only in use on Sundays so any compulsory MS updates will always be waiting to trip me up just then) . So I'm thinking I should just leave the HDD well alone and install Linux on the SSD instead and make Linux my main OS and keep Windows as my backup.
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Only drawbacks I can see are I am a reasonably proficient Windows user but a complete Linux 'noob'. I'd be using Libre Office instead of full blown MS Office (any little compatibility niggles there?) and - if I ever need to use my backup OS, I'm likely to find 6 months of Win 10 updates waiting to catch me out before I can do anything useful - perhaps making it a very limited backup option.
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Any advice on what way I should jump? I'm very happy with the OLP / VLC combo. Not so enamored with OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
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If I go with Linux as the main OS can I use Wine to run proper MS Office with Ubuntu OLP? Or will that only introduce all sorts of crazy compatibility issues?
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I know several of the developers are FOSS fans so hopefully someone can advise if I should stick with what I know better or join the Linux revolution...
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baldrick45