Linux. Does nothing without your express permission and doesn't report on you to all and sundry. It also requires an administrator password to do anything system-critical, which minimises the risk of bricking the whole system. Even if you're your own admin, it gives you pause for thought before you enter that command that deletes the entire contents of your hard drive 

@Sox35 The only irreplaceable things on your computer are located in /home/you, and for deleting that you won't be asked for any root password. Material for thought....

@Sox35 The only irreplaceable things on your computer are located in /home/you, and for deleting that you won't be asked for any root password. Material for thought....

True, thinking about it. But deleting things elsewhere may well require a re-install, which is time consuming. Everyone's /home directories here are backed up daily to a network drive anyway.

We'll stick to using Linux, I've now had over 1,600 days operation without it falling over. 

Immunizes against what ?

Against the background connects to microsofts servers for telemetry. Love it or hate it windows 10 is forced on us if we want to be able to use an OS without knowing code or having to tweak things to run. Linux is great but everytime i try i get into difficulties with hardware or my programs dont run on it without lots of work. If this can change I will certainly try again.

I use mac because most of my stuff works. Really just wish i had MS paint. but it doesn't ask for updates all the time and it runs stable and well. Before this, i was a windows 7 guy and before that windows xp was my game.

Anyways Im not trying to start debates here I just wanted to say that if you go mac, right now you can get away with using the older 2012 stuff if you like adding ram and stuff.

That is fighting the OS from within the running OS itself. The OS will win here, if not today then tomorrow. It will because being an OS, it have higher privileges than anything other software running under it can do. Maybe it is winning right now without your knowledge

Older Apple looks like fair solution if it works for you. I use PC hardware that is ~12 years old, and just like you suggest with maxed out RAM, and it works exceptionally well. So you gotta be ok on the hardware side of things. Dont know regarding the OS

In Linux the way is to find the natively working programs to do the things you want. For example a paint program that is very similar to the Windows XP MSpaint is Kolourpaint. (Some of the lamp icons you can see in "more" have been drawn in Kolourpaint). On the "having to know commands" part - The Linux system i use (Gentoo) - by choice - is one that requires quite a lot of commandline maintenance. I don't use any of the "easy" Linux systems so can't comment first hand on how much they require or dont require advanced knowledge to operate. I do expect that for something like Mint the requirements are quite minimal though

Against the background connects to microsofts servers for telemetry.

Fact is Windows 10 is known spyware. Yes there's a list of options you can disable, but you can't disable all of it.
Is you're going to use Win 10, the best option is to block all attempts of connections to MS servers at the network level. (this same thing can be done to block the spyware in Android devices like tablets)...plus all ad-servers.


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In Linux the way is to find the natively working programs to do the things you want. For example a paint program that is very similar to the Windows XP MSpaint is Kolourpaint.

Do you know if there is a Linux equivalent to MS PaintBrush?? (which IMO was way better than Paint)

Kolourpaint is not identical to MS paint. It is similar and better in its own ways, maybe some things you are looking for from Paintbrush are present there as well

First installed Linux (Red Hat): 1999
(was also trying Mandrake in between)
Used as a primary OS (Debian): since around 2008?
now installed on all our private (non-mobile) devices (x64 Mint, or ARM64 Debian on a single board computer)

What I mostly hate on Windows I have to use professionally is their permanent business - downloading gigabytes of data without asking, heating CPU by some dubious system processes without asking a lot of disk activity while idle.

Back in 2001-2003 I was maintaining some Macs owned by people in the film industry. I soon came to a realisation these were no miracles (compared to PCs) - the HW looked much better but their performance wasn't better compared to high performance PCs at that time).

I was also experimenting with FreeBSD (which is also an interesting system) and some others but Linux will probably remain my primary OS for the rest of my life.

I was also experimenting with FreeBSD (which is also an interesting system) and some others but Linux will probably remain my primary OS for the rest of my life.

No probably about it here. The distro we are currently using is Fedora, which came originally from Red Hat. Currently on v31, with a few breaks to try different things I've been using it since v10.

Yes there are things that it can't do that I need Windoze for, but it's only a couple of specialist programs for programming our 2-way radios and updating the SatNav. Both of which don't need to be done on a daily basis. I have a spare machine which I keep a (heavily modified) copy of Win10 on, but it could equally be done using a second hard drive in this machine. I might do that one day.

Older Apple looks like fair solution if it works for you. I use PC hardware that is ~12 years old, and just like you suggest with maxed out RAM, and it works exceptionally well. So you gotta be ok on the hardware side of things. Dont know regarding the OS

I'm using MacOS 10.15 Catalina

Fact is Windows 10 is known spyware. Yes there's a list of options you can disable, but you can't disable all of it.
Is you're going to use Win 10, the best option is to block all attempts of connections to MS servers at the network level.

If I had the means to do that by network I would. Honestly I wish someone made an OS that has the benefits of all 3 in one, because none of the 3 are great in my opinion for differing reasons. I'm probably just going to get a newer mac mini when this 2012 one becomes fully unsupported in a few years or so

Fact is Windows 10 is known spyware. Yes there's a list of options you can disable, but you can't disable all of it.
Is you're going to use Win 10, the best option is to block all attempts of connections to MS servers at the network level.

As I said, I use it only for two specialist purposes. They can poke around all they like on it (provided it's switched on and they can get past my firewall) but I doubt they'll see much to interest them. All my daily work is done on the Linux machines.

My Linux system of choice is Gentoo - The one where you install from source code and build your own setup. It is an advanced system and it really gives power that no other Linux system i know does. I moved directly from Windows 2000 Professional to Gentoo in 2003, contrary to all recommendations to choose something "easy". Although, later i switched to Arch for a few years and then returned to Gentoo

My desktop is Plasma (KDE)

Honestly I wish someone made an OS that has the benefits of all 3 in one, because none of the 3 are great in my opinion for differing reasons. I'm probably just going to get a newer mac mini when this 2012 one becomes fully unsupported in a few years or so

It may be possible. I dont know what you are looking for tho..

Audacity and VLC are both available on Linux, we use VLC on a daily basis. Haven't use Audacity for a while, but I think it's still installed.

Don't play games so that aspect doesn't matter to us. We use Thunderbird for email. It's simple and it works. WINE can be used to run many Win .exe programms, but not all. The ones I use such as Ace Money (a money manager) and Echolink (an amateur radio program) work fine. The only ones that I would like to work but don't are the radio programmer and the Satnav updater  

I like mac os because it runs well on my hardware (obviously lol) it doesn't appear to track or pester me for lengthy updates on the daily and most of my favourite programs are available for it like audacity, VLC etc. I realize that these may also be on linux. A program called openemu is mac only and it lets me emulate all my old school games like gameboy (it even adds colour to the original games the same way a gameboy colour would). I also use apples mail app so I can read my emails as i get them.

Mac OS is actually a cousin of linux by the way as they share components.

I wish it had the ability to open windows .exe programs as well as come with MS paint (i know its crap compared to others but i know it like the back of my hand) and I wish it was available to be installed on any system like windows and linux


I would like to note that mac os has a terminal and can be used to unlock disabled features or change permissions. It also has bootcamp so I could install windows on the computer natively and be able to boot one or the other. Could look into this if I add a second SSD to my mac mini. I just need to order the sata cable for it from ebay

Audacity and VLC are indeed available for all 3 OS. For a Paint program see above. For game emulation i dont know

OS X shares some concepts but virtually no actual components with Linux. OS X uses the core of BSD (a descendant of the original UNIX) with most everything else built by Apple themselves. Linux systems use Linux (made form scratch) with other things built by many other projects, most notably GNU and the various desktop projects. BSDs (like FreeBSD) use the BSD core with the
GNU/desktops rest of the system, so you could say it is some inbetween system. However, you dont interact with the core in any way in most "user friendly" systems, only with the rest of the system. And those components are the same betweel Linux and BSDs so as user you won't notice much of difference

Running executables of one OS on another is sorta like trying to run a HPS lamp on a LED driver.... Programs are specialiesd for one system. (ones that are available for few systems, still come compiled separately for each system). The programs are differently built as they do system calls differently (for each system), require different other frameworks to be installed, and so on. There are some "adapters" made such as Wine, that work by intercepting and translating all such system calls, but being "adapters" their capabilites are limited. The proper way is to find programs that do the actions / support the file formats you want, that are native for the system you have. But there are cases where such programs just dont exist or are not developed enough to be usable