Build an Open Windows Alternative! - a Guide for Switching from Windows 10 to Zorin OS

welcome back ladies and gents today we are building an open alternative to windows 10 using the power of the linux desktop now this is a follow-up video to a video that i made about a month ago now and it was about building an open alternative to mac os and uh yeah that video did okay so i thought you know what it's uh the windows 10 folks are missing out time to make a guide for how to start switching your workflow from the windows 10 operating system that is own maintained and uh developed by microsoft incorporated and move towards a more open source privacy aware system and to do that we have got some suggestions mostly orientating around zoran os so i'm going to leave that for now there's a few things that i want to break down in this video of course it's going to be a long one because it's a fairly exhaustive comprehensive kind of guide so here's a few here's a bit of an outline of what you can expect from this video part one i'm going to unpack the strengths and weaknesses of windows 10 that we need to be aware of and then we can try to replicate that same functionality uh in an open alternative part two is then going to be looking at the strengths that zorran os brings to the table and how i think those things map fairly closely to what people have come to appreciate about windows and then try to remove some of the weaknesses that windows 10 has now the things that i won't really talk about too much that are kind of inherently known about linux versus windows is that yes windows 10 has a lot of privacy invasive ish telemetry and user data that gets mined from this system and so as a general rule linux and linux desktop operating systems are far more respectful of users privacy and uh and also arguably are more secure from viruses malware and that kind of thing those things have been going around the internet for ages so i'm not going to talk about them in this video then after i have unpacked the strength of zorin os i will give you some suggestions for how you can tweak your xaron os setup to make it uh function a little bit more like a smooth windows 10 modern experience finally i'll give you some app recommendations to kind of start beefing out your setup and start expl uh helping you explore what is possible in the free and open source software world hope you've got it so let's get underway today's episode was made possible by nordvpn check out the link in the description to make some huge savings on one of the internet's leading vpn providers and stay tuned for more details later in the video okay so part one strengths and weaknesses of windows 10. windows 10 is everywhere uh it is the software that microsoft is is kind of bound by and and needs to support for a lot of businesses and users around the world over a billion people have a billion devices have windows 10 on them but it might not be for everyone and so first of all before we go any further let's try and figure out what are some of the strengths that zorin os needs to try and replicate or that we need to at least come close to to be able to enjoy the same benefits as windows 10. first of all backwards compatibility is a big strength of windows 10. you can in theory run a lot of old windows software on new windows operating systems so backwards compatibility is something that needs to be replicated more or less when it comes to supporting older software whether it's windows software or otherwise next we want a relatively flexible bottom panel like the taskbar we want a relatively flexible menu system or menu search and launch system because the start menu search that windows 10 has is actually pretty capable and it would be great to have a relatively customizable tray that can organize our notifications our system controls and whatever else we need also we want something that can replicate a tablet interface or at least a two in one form factor there are a lot of two in ones out there in the world today and and that's something that windows 10 caters for that not a lot of linux desktops do now it goes without saying that there is enormous app ecosystem for windows 10. that's just a strength that windows is always going to have you can't possibly have a billion users of the same operating system without having an enormous app ecosystem another thing to be aware of is that windows generally speaking has fantastic hardware optimization because it is in microsoft's best interest to load up windows on as many oems or hardware manufacturers as possible and make sure that the windows experience works really well on the devices that they sell now my recommendations that i can give you just straight away here if you're interested in buying new hardware and you want to get something that has zorin os or other stuff on top of it then definitely go and check out star labs system 76 and tuxedo computers all three of these and there are more uh ship excellent quality hardware with linux already pre-installed and it's great hardware support but nevertheless windows 10 has fantastic hardware support across a multitude of platforms we need to have something that can replicate that compatibility somehow the other strength that windows 10 has is really good scaling support and managing multiple screen resolutions so when you plug in an external monitor to your laptop that has a 4k display being able to drop the scaling down on the external monitor but keep it on your monitor that's something that windows does for the most part pretty well it'd be great to see if we could replicate that in linux as well it's getting there spoiler alert it's not perfect but it's getting there also it'd be great to have the windows subsystem for linux prints wait a minute yet we're dealing with a linux kernel we've got the linux kernel we can move on we need something that can do window tiling across quadrants so that being able to click and drag windows and tile them to the four corners of your desktop is something that windows 10 does really nicely we need to make sure we can do that as well as managing virtual desktops so we can spread our windows across multiple desktops another strength that windows 10 has that we need is solid backups being able to have incremental backups that just spit the data that's changed to wherever our backup destination is in windows this is called file history and it's pretty good so we need to make sure that we can at least get something close to that if we're trying to build an open alternative finally we need to have good mobile integration because uh yeah windows 10 with the your phone app is actually pretty decent with integrating with android phones at the very least so integrating with android phones is very doable on xaron os and it's just called zarin connect i'm not going to talk about it in the video because it's very simple to set up and use go into your the google play store download zoran connect open xoranconnect on zarin bing bang boom finally we need integration or at least access to and compatibility with office 365 and onedrive and the microsoft ecosystem in general because if you're a student or if you are tied to a workplace that uses a lot of these services you need to be able to log into your email and use your cloud storage and stuff like that finally the big one gaming support this one has gotten a lot better over the last two years when it comes to what is available in the linux world and while gaming is still a big strength of windows 10 we can still replicate a lot of the core gaming functionality that windows 10 gives gamers on linux which is pretty sweet spoiler alert a lot of the funky hardware controls when it comes to rgb lighting and stuff is experimental at best so google ubuntu and the name of whatever funky hardware you've got lying around in terms of rgb keyboards mice lighting setups whatever and see what's out there uh do your research first and see how you go but in terms of actual software and gaming installing games it might not be as bad as you think so buckle up let's see what we can do now the weaknesses of windows have been well documented throughout the years so i'm just going to belt through them really quickly first of all windows 10 has an extremely fragmented app ecosystem whether it's downloading a exe or a dot msi or downloading stuff from the windows store downloading stuff from the steam store downloading stuff from goodness knows what other stores are out there also there's no native package manager on windows to seamlessly update the software that's on your computer for the most part it's in the works but it's something that they haven't really had up to this point there is also a lot of legacy craft that is lying around in the windows in the windows operating system that makes it a lot more sluggish not to mention a lot more large in terms of the amount of disk space that it takes up brand new install of windows takes up about 20 gig of your disk space and that's likely to gobble up more the older it gets whereas a basic linux install can get you in for five to seven gigs there is a lot of bloat out of the box and also every six months microsoft will push a new feature update that inevitably ends up breaking a lot of things and frustrating a lot of professional desktop users also some of their built-in apps are varying levels of quality when was the last time anybody opened up groov music for example now before we go any further if you are interested in finding the closest representation of windows 10 in the linux world i've got a gift for you and it's called linux fx10 i'll leave a link in the description it's basically a carbon copy of windows 10 but using linux i'm not recommending it here because i don't think it has what we really want we're not trying to ape windows 10 we just want to replicate the functionality in the open source world okay let's get onto the desktop and see what we can do before we dive in a quick word from today's sponsor nordvpn so chances are that if you're thinking about switching your workflow from windows 10 to a linux based os then privacy is probably one of your digital priorities now with so many people working from home and not having access to their workplace's network security it might be high time to take one more step to secure your internet privacy at home with nordvpn nordvpn is one of the most private and fully featured vpn providers on the internet with thousands of superfast servers in 60 countries with unlimited bandwidth and double data encryption and a strict no logs policy for a truly private internet connection they support all the major operating systems out there including linux and have super simple browser extensions for all of the major internet browsers now i've been using nordvpn for close to four years now and nordvpn as like a service provider have not been sitting around either they've got 24 7 customer support and they've been rolling out new services like nord links which linux users can definitely take advantage of as it's built around the wire guard vpn protocol basically it just gives you extra speed without compromising privacy it's a completely new way of thinking about vpns so go and check out nordvpn following the link in the description or go to nordvpn.com infinitely galactic for 70 off a three-year plan so basically for less than the cost of a fancy coffee per month you won't have to worry about having a secure private internet connection for the next three years and not only that but by using the link below you'll also be helping out yours truly to keep making content and i consider that a win-win so go check it out and thanks to nordvpn for supporting the channel and sponsoring today's episode okay so let's start out by talking about the strengths of zoran os as a project and why i've chosen it as kind of the base for this whole building and open alternative to windows 10. so there's a few different things that i want to mention here first of all um this isn't by by any means a full-on review of zorin os as an operating system you can go check out other videos there's plenty of them out there i'll link to mine up in the cards but there's a few key reasons that i see as strengths for zoronos for people who are looking to switch away from windows so first of all it's built on arguably the most popular linux base out there which is ubuntu so that means it runs in the same security and release cycle that ubuntu has meaning that the base that zoronos uses stays the same and in theory you could run it for five years in some cases more than five years as it stands the the thing that zarin os does differently to a lot of the standard uh ubuntu releases is that it does actually back port little bits and pieces of the desktop and also it keeps the hardware up to date even though the base of this system came out in 2018 so even though we're looking at almost a two-year-old operating system at this point it still has an up-to-date linux kernel more or less and that leads to a lot better improvements when it comes to things like battery life on laptops with linux kernel uh 5.4 and a few other things that i don't really have to have time to go into here but i really think that zoran os has a great balance between stability and and having up-to-date desktop and definitely security is a strong suit there as well just with linux in general because of the fact it's based on ubuntu you also get a lot of community support so any issues that you might have solutions that work for ubuntu usually work for zoran os as well so with xorin you do have a very familiar layout with the panel and the taskbar the the menu system and just the general look and feel of the desktop it does have a really good flat sort of minimalistic kind of theme to it the other thing that i do want to point out is that when it comes to scaling if you have a high pixel density display or if you have a high resolution display the interface just through this through the theming that it already has lends itself fairly well to um to very high resolution displays and uh better scaling support especially across individual monitors and stuff like that comes with uh updated release down the track i would say so out of the box it looks okay and definitely if you're on a high resolution monitor like a 4k monitor um then it shouldn't look too out of place but if it does then i would suggest you have a look inside zorin appearance change things like the font size etc and the height of the panel the size of the icons and you should be okay the actual window controls themselves are fairly decent size out of the box so they should scale up to a higher resolution if you need to do that now the other thing that i really like about zorin is that for a gnome based interface now gnome is just a desktop environment that a lot of linux distributions use for a gnome-based interface this desktop environment in my experience on relatively modern hardware is very sprightly and the other thing that zoran does very well is that pre-installed software that comes as part of zorin or very easily installable on xorin makes gaming a lot easier than it is on other distributions now popular operating systems on the linux side of things like popos also include this but the learning curve here on zorin is not quite as large as if you were to use one of those other linux distributions so for example if you want to install a lot of your windows games on xyron os all you need to do is install lutrus and lutress will go out and download a lot of the things that you need to be able to run the majority of windows games and some other software on linux the other nice thing that the the zoran os team do that is unique to their distribution is that they package up more recent versions of the translation software that allows you to run windows software on zorin so that means that you get much better support for installing windows software compared to a lot of other linux distributions so when you download lutrus you'll be able to download a lot of the other bits and pieces that you that your computer needs to run windows software at least a fair chunk of windows software um on your new zorran system another great choice that zarin make is that they bundle nvidia drivers into their os by default so if you notice the first time that you boot xron os you have the option to boot it with modern nvidia drivers now of course if you have an amd graphics card or if you just integrated intel graphics no problem but nvidia drivers have always been a little bit problematic on linux but it's great that zorin takes the initiative and smooths some of that out for you so you don't have to worry about it the other nice touch that i do appreciate about zarin is that the software that they choose to use out of the box integrates very nicely with the online accounts here in system settings so simply going to the menu clicking settings and going to online accounts you can log in with different online accounts here and they will integrate automatically into things like the calendar into things like the email client which is evolution and the story goes on it's just a really nice touch that a lot of linux distributions do ship with different calendars and different email programs but they almost they hardly ever integrate perfectly in the desktop straight from the get-go i might also mention that with google accounts and some other accounts you can also get cloud storage integrated straight here into the file manager under network shares which is which is also a really nice touch so if you already have google drive as a cloud setup a cloud storage setup then you can very easily log in and have that integrated straight into your desktop now another thing that i've noticed about zarin more than other distributions of linux out there is that they have really great documentation and support that the community have provided so i want to link in the description below an unofficial manual for the um for zorran os and this unofficial manual has a lot of goodies to be found in it so if you're the kind of person who wants to read up all about what this thing is capable of before you go and pull the trigger and switch from windows to something like xyron os then go and check out the link in the description and download the unofficial manual this thing is huge um and it has a lot of great details about just what you can do with this system so these are just some of the reasons that i think zoranos makes a great case for somebody who's wanting to move away from windows 10 and start exploring what open source alternatives are out there a lot of these things do apply to other distributions but all in the one package i think that's why zoran os has a lot of strengths okay now let's start talking about tweaking when you uh when you download the zoranos core which is the the free option on their website which i'll quickly point out here when you go to the download xor and button if you go to their core edition you can pay for the ultimate edition which basically gives you a lot more bundled software and layouts that you can choose from but you can just download the core as well which is what i've done and what i'm working with here today the uh the 39 option to purchase ultimate is really a way of supporting the developers who are putting this system together everything that you see in ultimate for the most part you can achieve with the free version but it's going to take you a little bit of time and tinkering so if you want to reach out and support the developers for the quality stuff that they're doing then i highly recommend you go and grab the 39 ultimate edition and install it you'll have a lot of fun with it but for what we're going to do today we're just going to be sticking with the core edition you can download for free so when it comes to tweaking zara os if you're an existing windows 10 user there's a few things that i'd love to share with you first of all i've got a few tabs open here of different things that i've been that i've found over my years of using linux and i want to share some of those things with you based on what i can see current trends in windows 10. so first of all one thing that's very close to my heart is uh is multi-touch gestures on track pads now a lot of modern hardware especially on laptops gives support on windows 10 for multi-touch gestures things like three fingers up to go to the multitasking view things like swiping with three or four fingers left or right to switch workspaces stuff like that so interestingly enough there is a project that i've referred to a few times on the channel called fusuma and although the instructions are relatively nerdy and you might want to take some time to digest them and see if it's within your capabilities to do this kind of thing it's something that i really recommend people take the time to work out now if you're not too fussed about multi-touch gestures or you have a desktop then this doesn't apply to you but i'll leave the link in the description for your own reading and you can go and check that out for me it's one of the first things that i do when i set up a desktop because most of the time i am working on a laptop and it makes all the difference for things like jumping forward and back in a web browser it's just a lot smoother and fusuma seems to be one of those that uh that seems to work quite reliably for me every single time i also want to talk about uh tiling because when it comes to tiling the desktop environment that zaran uses can do window tiling left or left and right but it can't do quadrant tiling and so this is where something like wind tile comes in now i can't mention winter without talking about gnome extensions gnome extensions are basically little bits of software that you can add to your desktop to make your desktop do cool things now the fun thing is is that a lot of gnome extensions you can simply install from the software center that's built in to zorran if you do want to go down that route you simply open up the software center go to add-ons and you can see here that i've got a huge long list of gnome extensions my problem with this is that they don't sort them out of the box we have codecs fonts hardware drivers input sources and shell extensions and these aren't sorted at least to my knowledge in any uh in any way so it makes it quite hard to find what you're looking for and the search function doesn't seem to work all that well for these add-ons either so what you can do is you open up a web browser go to extensions.gnome.org and you can very easily search for the extension that you're looking for now this one called win tile is enabled so that you can use quadrant tiling here on your desktop and you can see what this gif is showing us here and this is very useful if you've got a large monitor or you're used to being able to have the four quadrant tiling like it is on windows 10. now in order to enable this you need to a install a browser extension through firefox so we just simply click the agree download button add it to the browser we say okay got it thank you very much we reload the page and then all you need to do is say on and that will add the genome extension to your desktop through the web browser and then in theory we should have quadrant tiling so now you can see i can tile my windows across the four corners of the desktop now in my case i've only got a 15-inch laptop screen so i don't think i'd be doing this all that often but if you are in the mood for splitting your screens in multiple ways then that's going to be a great help to you now moving on i do want to mention briefly the two in one support this was something i probably should have mentioned closer to the strengths of zoran os but funnily enough there actually is support for a tablet mode here in zorran and now a lot of linux distributions kind of ignore the the fact that there are two in one devices out there and yet zarin took the time uh the zoranos team took the time to include a touch layout of their desktop and also made the window controls and other things relatively manageable for a touch screen so when you switch to the touch layout you'll notice that the desktop kind of rearranges itself to a more touch friendly layout the idea being that your panel here at the bottom orientates itself to the middle and your menu then becomes a full screen app launcher menu as opposed to a little kickoff menu at the bottom now i don't know honestly if there's a way that you can trigger this automatically when you either take the keyboard off your device or flip it around but it is nice to see that the inclusion is there for those that want it switching between layouts is a little bit laggy on my virtual machine but on real hardware it doesn't take too long to switch between the two now i do want to also quickly flag that out of the box firefox at least in its current form doesn't really support touch scrolling on linux based distributions now it's very easy to enable or when i say easy there's a little bit of tweaking involved but it is relatively easy to enable so again i'm just going to leave a just a link in the description down below i'm not going to show you how to do that now but you can definitely go and follow that link if you are curious in how to enable touch screen scrolling in the web browser on zorran okay now let's talk about how we're going to tweak this desktop and make it look like a relatively modern windows 10 desktop it's pretty straight forward to be honest because most of the things that you want to change are in the zoran appearance app there's a fair bit of tweaking that you can do here first of all you can change where you want the title buttons we're going to leave them at the left hand side for now the theme you can come in and change the accent color so for example if you're a fan of purple you can change the accent color and the icon scheme to purple you can change the dark mode or have it automatically switch between light and dark mode depending on the time of day which is kind of handy and finally when we get to panel you can change things like the height of the panel therefore the height of the icons you can enable or disable dynamic transparency something that i like to do is center the task bar so that you have all of your icons and the pinned apps that you have on the taskbar centered in the middle kind of like taskbar x on the windows side of things and you also have a choice between using the left super key which is traditionally the windows key on your keyboard to either trigger the menu or you can use it to trigger the activities overview now the activities overview is kind of like the timeline view in windows 10 gives you a view of your active workspaces you can add or remove these dynamically and also your active windows it spreads them out and shows you what you have going on now for me personally i like to leave the windows the windows key on this activity overview the reason being is because there's a very powerful search tool up in the top here that you can use with a simple click of the windows key start typing and you will get a lot of different options that come up depending on what you're looking for so you can actually use this for searching for files that are saved on your desktop you can also use it for searching through settings like i've done here eventually things options will populate from the software store and elsewhere to try and be as useful as possible so this search tool is actually very powerful but it's very understated in its position here at the desktop so for me personally i like to leave the windows key mapped to this particular layout because it shows me everything that is going on but if you're more of a traditional user and you're used to seeing the windows windows 10 start menu and that's a little bit of a hard habit to break then definitely use that and you can still have simple search just for the apps and programs that are installed here on the desktop it won't search files or settings or anything deeper than just what is displayed here in the menu so it's just something to keep in mind the activities overview is far more powerful and that's why i generally like to leave it there the other thing is i do like to have the show activities button they're just in the same position as the timeline view on windows 10 usually is as well all right so once we have uh enabled all of those things now we have a relatively modern looking desktop already you can feel free to come in and change things like the background again i'm going to use the windows key to change to search for where background is and take me straight to it they have a few great wallpapers built into xyrem by default including one that changes colors depending on what time of day it is and that's where i'm going to leave mine for the day one thing that i did forget to mention was that i do like to have the the proper date down here in the panel as well and that's just about coming down to the clock and calendar section and enabling the date so that the date lives down here in the notification section so notifications will populate in the little notification manager off to the side you can hit do not disturb if you don't want to see those and then obviously you have your very simple settings lock screen power on power off that kind of thing and volume along the way now on the windows side of things you have a a set of fonts that are common to most versions of windows these are the fonts like times new roman and aerial and the rest of them now unfortunately those because of the licensing that those fonts have they can't come out of the box in a lot of linux distributions but they are a relatively simple command away from installing these on your xoronos system so if you go to the terminal type sudo apt install ttf m s core fonts dash installer then that should go out and grab the package that you need to have these fonts like ariel times new roman etc the reason being is we have to be able to agree to the end user license agreement say enter do you agree yes you do and it will go out and install those for us basically it just leads to a lot better compatibility with any microsoft office documents that you might get sent and you need to open now once those fonts are installed the only other thing that i would recommend that we do is go and grab the uh you go and grab the link for a remote software repository or software store known as flat up now for those who have been in the linux world for a while you already know that flat hub holds an awful lot of software in it which is very useful for those who want to take full advantage of the linux desktop and all the software that it has to offer um so the good news is that flat pack support is enabled in zoran os out of the box all you need to do is go to flathub.org find a flat hub or find a flat pack program that you like for example vlc sounds good to us click the install button and you will get a reference file this reference file is very small it's basically like a map for to point the software center to where to find this particular piece of software and all the others now the first time we do things it might be a little bit clunky as this is operating on a slightly older version of the software center so the integration between flat hub this external software source that we're getting things from and the software center is a little clunky but as you can see it's gone ahead and it started installing vlc from flathub and now all we'll need to do is once that's finished installing it's always good to log out log back in and when you go back into the software center in the future you should have all of the apps available from flathub as well as the native software resources and also the snap packages these are basically all just different package formats that are all tied brought together into the software center so that you can install whatever free and open source software and even some proprietary software from this one software center so we've covered a fair bit of ground already now what i'd like to do is talk about a few app recommendations that might help set yourself up in your new zoran os install and also get you going with basic desktop use and also maybe a few little bits and pieces that can help you stay backed up and up to date so first of all let's deal with backups really quickly the recommendation that i'd have for you is to use the built-in backup tool now what this will do once you have enabled it all you need to do is give it a particular location to store your backups now by default it will just choose to backup your user profile so basically this means your photos your documents your music that you store in the file browser in your documents downloads etc folders now by default it tends to ignore the downloads folder and the rubbish bin but you can add more folders that you want to ignore you can also add more folders that you want to make sure are saved by default you can see my home folder is being saved and downloads and rubbish bin are being ignored what i love about this particular backup utility is that it's built into the desktop it's very lightweight it's very simple to get your head around it you can schedule what you want to backup when and you can schedule where you want to store that particular thing now in my particular case what i tend to do is i schedule a backup that goes to my local network attached storage and also a backup that goes to my external hard drive i usually run this once a week and the software will very uh gently prompt me when that backup is due by simply saying that it will back up once the storage is attached the other nice thing is that you can encrypt those backups so that uh even if you do back everything up um no one will be able to access those backed up files unless they have your decryption password and all that is just built in which is really nice what i do want to add is that if you are a bit of a tinkerer and you are likely to break your system from time to time i'd highly recommend you go and check out a piece of software called time shift a lot of linux distributions do ship time shift with their operating system time shift is a great way to back up the system itself create snapshots of the system and be able to roll back to that previous snapshot so in order to install this though there's a few little instructions that you need to follow which is outside of the scope of this video but if you are likely to break your system and you want to have a full snapshot always available to roll back to then i definitely recommend you go and install timeshift by following the instructions at the official website in the link below i want to give you a quick recommendation for an app launcher that you can use now on the windows 10 side of things power toys are gaining popularity especially the keyboard launcher that that microsoft have started to make now you launcher has been around for quite a long time on the linux desktop and it basically does the exact same thing it is very customizable it has lots and lots of extensions out there and being able to download a simple installer file and get a powerful keyboard launcher uh even more powerful customizable and extendable than the default windows key that you have built into the desktop is very cool so for power users out there definitely recommend you go and grab you launcher and look at all that you can do with it it's a very small file to download and it takes hardly any resources on your system to do the magic that it does so keyboard aficionados pay attention next let's talk about gaming i mentioned it very briefly already but the golden standard for how to install games on linux is always going to be through lootres and then secondarily through steam now steam has a fantastic amount of titles that are natively supported on linux but it also has plenty of compatibility for uh for titles that are built for windows but run really well on linux as well so just go to the software center install steam install lutrus and just see what's possible i want to throw in a few more app recommendations things like zernal plus plus is a great pdf annotating and editing software i need to be careful when i say pdf editing it's great for pdf annotations and handwriting support so if you have a touch enabled device with a wacom stylus then using something like zernal plus plus is a great way to take advantage of that form factor i'm trying to target apps that replicate a lot of the built-in functionality in windows 10. if you're into note-taking then i highly recommend you either look into joplin which is also available in the software store as it is basically an open source it's an open source version of evernote if you're really into note-taking and staying organized on your desktop and if you want access to simply the onenote that you already know and love just by typing onenote in the top software search gives you access to p3x onenote now all this is is an electron wrapper of the online onenote which is in itself quite capable but it saves things like the last onenote that you had open persistent logins rudimentary offline support stuff like that so you can go and grab those apps if you need access to onenote on your linux desktop if you need access to a to do app then i have two recommendations if you're just looking for something simple there is a built-in app that uh that the gnome desktop offers you and it's simply just called to do but there are honestly so many out here that you could use including electron versions of things like the microsoft to do and my personal favorite which is called planner that integrates very well with the well-known todoist application so if you want to stay productive and stay on track with what you need to get done any of these apps are an excellent recommendation let's talk briefly about microsoft office support now out of the box you get a full offer suite installed on zorin it's called libreoffice it's kind of the standard when it comes to open source free software office productivity however in my opinion while libreoffice is fantastic for creating documents i've found that the one-to-one compatibility with microsoft office documents can be a little bit here or there depending on the document that you're dealing with a office suite that i have found that gives really great compatibility with microsoft office documents is only office now in my case i'm going to recommend that you download the version that comes from flat hub as uh this seems to be the the version of only office that gives me uh the best performance with the least amount of hiccups but as you can see there are two different versions that are available here there is one from the snapstore and one from the flat hub store as well now photo management is also fairly straightforward on the xaren desktop you get shotwell which is great for just rudimentary simple photo library management and simple edits if you're wanting to go a little bit more advanced there are lots of great raw editors out there that i could recommend kind of outside the scope of this video though but look up things like digicam and raw therapy and dark table these are all great photography software equivalent in one way or other to adobe lightroom like i mentioned before when it also comes to productivity and communication evolution being the default email client here on zoran os in my opinion is pretty suitable for most people if you want something that looks a little bit flashier and is a little bit more minimalistic then go and check out geary from the software store it's a very simple email client and if all you have is simple requirements then geary is a great way to get that done as you can see it just looks a little bit prettier and and is a little bit more lightweight than evolution but evolution integrates fantastically with most forms of email including including gmail and outlook and office exchange in 365 and so forth and so on the last hole in this puzzle is for cloud storage now the funny thing is is that when it comes to supporting onedrive which is the default cloud storage that comes on windows 10 that microsoft owns and manages onedrive support on linux is patchy at best you can go out and install a a backend that allows you to access and it will synchronize your onedrive to your linux desktop but for the most part these tools that are freely available are mostly run in the command line which is not ideal now there also is a a native tool that you can use to synchronize your onedrive to your linux desktop and it's called in sync now insync works really well i have uh i have had access to in-sync releases before but you also do need to be aware that in order to get the full features of everything that insync offers you do need to uh you do need to pay for the licensing it is a really great tool and if your productivity hinges on having excellent native built-in file synchronization to a multitude of cloud platforms then go and check out in sync however if you're just looking for a cloud storage provider that runs really well on linux and you don't really care whose it is as long as it is privacy aware then i definitely check out pcloud pcloud seems to have great linux support they have privacy and encryption kind of built in and other recommendations would include things like mega and then obviously the the prime culprits out there that most people are familiar with like dropbox and google drive are kind of supported out of the box by simply either installing dropbox from the software store or by uh simply logging into your google account in the zoran desktop now one final recommendation for you is to go and check out real linux user.com there are a lot of different uh tutorials and um and recommendations that uh this uh that john has made and uh he's categorized a lot of these uh tutorials and posts to people that want to use linux and utilize the power of desktop linux across a bunch of different fields now i believe he is mostly a photographer as well as other things so a lot of the posts that he makes comes from a creativity or photography sort of standpoint but because he runs his own business and other things as well there are other lenses that he can apply to how to get the most out of the linux desktop now the two uh the two systems or the three systems that he uses the most seem to be linux mint zoran os and elementary os which i would fully support as great places to start in desktop linux so definitely go check out real linux user and see if there are some suggestions that uh that he can uh provide you with fun fact there's half my face so uh this thing's mutual probably never met the guy but he seems like a fantastic contributor to desktop linux alrighty so i think that just about wraps up how you can build an open source alternative to windows 10 that does most of the things that you would want it to again it's all about identifying alternatives to the things that you do every day if this video helped you out then definitely leave a like once again i'll try to provide links below to all the things that i mentioned in this video and if you're coming from more of a mac os angle then definitely go and check out the the guide that i had to building an open source alternative to mac os came out a few weeks back at the time of the recording of this video thanks so much for watching i'll see you all in the next one hey blaine here thanks for checking out the infinitely galactic project look if you want to find more videos like this then definitely go check out the channel subscribe if you're new turn on notifications all that good stuff and you can chat with me on twitter at galactic see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 55,035

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, switching from windows 10 to linux, zorin os 15.2, zorin os, alternative to windows 10, switching to linux, guide, tutorial, windows 10 vs zorin os

Id: 3mzL9-rdArg

Length: 44min 26sec (2666 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020