Extra tips & tutorials

Thinking about changing to open source software can be scary for non-technical people (i.e. almost everybody). We’d like to persuade you that it’s really quite simple to start, and you’ll gain confidence as you use it more. If you can use the proprietary software, you’ll be able to use open source / free software too.

Linux is different from the programmes that you use to produce documents, spreadsheets, presentations, manipulate images, watch videos etc. Linux is an operating system – equivalent to Windows, rather than the programmes you run on it. So when you switch on your computer, you get a Linux system rather than Windows.

Now that you’ve switched to free / open source programmes and downloaded the Linux operating system onto a datastick, you can launch Linux from the datastick to familiarise yourself with it, but when you take the datastick out, it’s back to Windows.

So at the moment, your hard drive is all Windows, and you’ve practised running Linux from a datastick. But it runs slowly, because datasticks aren’t designed for swift data transfer – it’s like being on a little B-road compared to a motorway for data.

You’ve now got Linux installed on your hard drive and hopefully, it’s working well. It shouldn’t take much getting used to – if you know how to navigate around Windows, then Linux Mint is a doddle.