 I think one of the big reasons a lot of Windows users do not switch to Linux or when they first switch to Linux, they are not happy, right? They find things very foreign, very strange, and usually they'll just go back to Windows because that's what they know. All the programs they know are on Windows, and I think us in the Linux community, we really do these Windows users a disservice by trying to just throw them in the deep end of the pool immediately because if all you know is Windows as your operating system and all the proprietary software that's installed on Windows, if that's the world you know and you've never ventured outside of that world, then throwing somebody in an entirely free and open source operating system such as your typical Linux distribution, you know, it's all open source software on that thing, and these Windows users have never used any of those programs and I think that's part of the problem. I think other than trying to convert Windows users over to Linux, you know, change their operating system, I think first we just need to get Windows users used to using free and open source software because once they start using all the popular free and open source applications that are out there, then switching to Linux is a no-brainer because all the free and open source applications that they would be using on Windows of course are going to be available in Linux because in Linux free and open source is a first class citizen, right? There's very few free and open source applications out there that aren't developed for Linux, you know, usually they develop them specifically for Linux and then port them to the proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS 10. So what I wanted to do today is show you guys how I sometimes try to convert people that are stuck on Windows. They use Windows and maybe they have a workflow that just would never work on Linux. So I don't even try to convert them to Linux, but I try to make small changes in their life. For example, what's the most important program on your computer, the one you spend the most time with? The web browser, right? The first thing I do is I see if they're using proprietary garbage web browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, which are both closed source applications. You really don't know what those programs are doing to you. They have a lot of adware, a lot of spyware, they're tracking everything you do inside those browsers. I try to get them on a free and open source browser immediately. That's really the biggest change and I think this is the one that you guys, if you're out there and you're introducing people to open source software especially, the very first thing you want to get people on is a free and open source web browser because that's the most important first step. So if I'm dealing with a Windows user and I pulled up a VM here of Windows 10, I'm not very familiar with Windows 10, I've never really used it, so give me a second here. But you know, I would get into the Microsoft Store here and first I would search for Firefox because that is the biggest free and open source browser on the planet. And Firefox, they've got some Firefox guides, a Firefox movie. They don't actually have Mozilla Firefox in the Microsoft Store. That is not surprising because it is a competing browser. So let me open up Microsoft Edge. Now Microsoft Edge, even though it is proprietary garbage, it is a pretty good browser. And by a pretty good browser, I mean it's pretty good for going to Mozilla.org and downloading Firefox. That's what Microsoft Edge is really good for. And if you go to the Mozilla.org homepage, the very first button at the top says download Firefox and of course that's what we want to do. And we have to give Windows permission, I guess, to run this executable. Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device? Absolutely. I want Mozilla Firefox on this computer. And then I want to get rid of Microsoft Edge if at all possible. Now Microsoft may prevent you from actually removing the Edge browser from Microsoft Windows, but at least I can probably remove the icon from the desktop and from the bar. Launch Microsoft Edge again because again, every move you make is being tracked. When you use a proprietary web browser like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, I wouldn't use Vivaldi. Either Vivaldi is a proprietary browser, Opera is also a proprietary browser. Really Firefox is the standard when it comes to free and open source web browsers. Let's run through the startup here, the setup here for Firefox. I click the button, import your bookmarks and passwords. So this would import everything from the Edge browser or the Chrome browser and all of that. I won't go through that on camera, but once you get that set up, I mean, you're good to go. At that point, you have taken care of one of the biggest security and privacy issues on Windows and that is the browser. Now, can I actually right click on this and delete Microsoft Edge from the desktop? Yes, I can. Can I delete it from the panel here? I can unpin it and let's see. Can I just drag Firefox down here? Yes, I can. So I've got one free and open source application installed now. And that's what I want to do. And that's what I want to do with new, potential new to Linux users, but people that are still stuck on Windows, they're not ready to jump into Linux as their operating system, but start introducing them to all this great free and open source software. For example, most Windows users are going to want Microsoft Office or they're going to use Office 365. Now that is, again, proprietary software, proprietary services. You don't know what that software is doing to you because it's all closed source. Again, there's spyware and tracking and all kinds of evil stuff in those programs. Introduce these folks to LibreOffice. Get your friends and family that are Windows users. Many of them probably don't want to pay the fees associated with Microsoft Office anyway. Tell them about LibreOffice. And I'm not even going to bother opening the Microsoft Store to look for LibreOffice because, again, I'm sure they're not going to put a competing product to Microsoft Office in their store, but I will just do a quick search here for LibreOffice here in Firefox and let's go to LibreOffice.org home page. And on the home page, you have a big button that says download now. If I click that and we come to the next page, Windows 64 bit. Download again. All right, I'm going to run through the LibreOffice installation. Just take a second and give it permission and LibreOffice is great. The LibreOffice suite is your free and open source alternative to Microsoft's Office suite. So you have a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a database program, a presentation program, anything that you can do in Microsoft Office. You can do in LibreOffice, but it is open source software, which means it respects you, the user. It respects your privacy and your security. It's not tracking you in any way. The source code is open. You can go and expect the source code to check to see what it's doing to you if you know some programming. And for those of you where money is an issue, of course, LibreOffice is free as in cost and click finish. And let me go ahead and close Firefox. And now we have LibreOffice 7.0 here. And if you click on it, you get the welcome screen here and it asks you which program do you want. The writer, the Cal, Impress, Draw, Math, Base. So these are the various programs. Writer is the word processor. So I'm going to click on writer. And of course here you could write whatever document you need to write, your essay or report or whatever it is that you use a word processor for. And Firefox and LibreOffice are two of the most popular free and open source programs on the planet. Hundreds of millions of people run those programs. So these are not obscure programs. And most people are probably going to end up liking these programs. If all you've ever used, especially as the Microsoft browsers, you're going to love Firefox is so much better than Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer, LibreOffice. Most people are going to love it, too. Because especially if you're not hardcore into office, if you don't have to use office every day for work or school, you just casually need to use a word processor or a spreadsheet program every now and then LibreOffice is perfect. Because it does almost everything Microsoft Office does, except you didn't have to pay for it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through everything that is installed in Windows because it's all proprietary software. And I'm just going to replace all these programs with the open source alternatives. The first thing I really think I need to take care of now that I got the web browser in the Office suite is multimedia players. I know Windows has a media player somewhere in here, but for audio and video, we can take care of that with one really fantastic free and open source program called VLC. So I'm going to go to the VLC site and grab VLC. Actually, I'm going to look for VLC in the Microsoft Store because VLC really doesn't compete with anything that Microsoft makes. At least nothing Microsoft makes money on. I mean, it competes, I guess, with Windows media player, but Microsoft isn't really making any money off that. Yeah. So VLC is actually in the Microsoft Store. I did a search for Firefox earlier. It wasn't here. I did a search for LibreOffice off-camera in the Microsoft Store. There are packages for LibreOffice, but they're not from the LibreOffice team. They're third-party people that packaged it for Windows and they're asking for payment. You know, like three bucks or whatever for payment for LibreOffice, they're asking you to pay them for packaging it. I guess don't do that. Go to the LibreOffice site and download it and if you want to give the LibreOffice guys money, there's a donate button on the download page. Make sure you donate to the LibreOffice project. Don't pay whoever packaged this thing for the Windows Store. So I'm going through here in the menu system and making sure I've got all my free and open source programs handy in the taskbar. So I've added Firefox, VLC, three different LibreOffice programs, the three most common ones, the word processor, the spreadsheet, and the presentation program. I'm running out of room here in this VM because the resolution is a little small. So I'm going to get rid of this search box. Can I hide that? Yes, now I have more room here. I do notice there is an email program here. Of course, Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox also makes a free and open source email client, Thunderbird. So I'm going to go grab the Thunderbird email client from the Thunderbird site at Thunderbird.net is the URL for that and it is finished installing and close that out. And this is Mozilla, Thunderbird, a very straightforward desktop email client so it can replace your proprietary email clients like Outlook. Let me drag Thunderbird down here where it's handy and then I don't need whatever email client that was. For me as a content creator on platforms like YouTube and library, I need some audio video stuff. I need audio editors and video editors and I need some programs to create graphics. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go grab some really fantastic free and open source software. I'm going to install some image programs such as GIMP and Inkscape. I also need a good audio editor and Audacity is just world class as a audio editor and it's free and open source software and it's available on Windows. For a video editor, I use Kaden Live on Linux. It's free and open source. I believe they have a Windows version of Kaden Live so I'll go ahead and install that as well. So I spent a few minutes here and now I have got the Firefox web browser installed for a great free and open source web browser privacy respecting. I have got the Thunderbird email client installed as well. So great desktop email client, VLC of course will be my audio and video player. VLC is fantastic. I have the LibreOffice suite. I now have Audacity for my audio editor for recording audio, editing audio, for doing any kind of podcast work. Audacity is just one of the best pieces of software on the planet. I also installed Kaden Live. I've actually never used the Kaden Live video editor on Windows. I don't know how well it would work on Windows, on Linux. It's a pretty fantastic piece of software though. So I quite like Kaden Live. I'm really happy that it is cross-platform for you guys that are on Windows. Give it a try. GIMP is fantastic. I've used GIMP on Windows and on Linux and GIMP is fantastic. It is our free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop and I've never used Photoshop. I've actually been a GIMP user longer than I've used Linux. I was using GIMP 12, 13 years ago when I was still a full-time Windows user since switching to Linux. I've always been a GIMP user. So I don't know anything about Photoshop but GIMP is a fantastic piece of software. I use it to create all the channel artwork for my YouTube channel and everything. I also went ahead and installed Inkscape. Inkscape is another graphics program where GIMP is for raster-based images. Inkscape is for scalable graphics. Also other free and open source software I could install on Windows, OBS, the open broadcaster software is what almost everybody uses to stream on YouTube and Twitch and other streaming platforms. Fantastic piece of free and open source software. One of my favorite FTP clients is a program called FileZilla and it's another program I've used for decades, a couple of decades. I was using FileZilla before I switched to Linux free and open source software. If you want a great zip, unzip kind of program and archive manager, Sevenzip is free and open source software. Most people on the planet, of course have heard of that program Sevenzip and I would certainly use that rather than any proprietary alternatives that may be suggested to you on Windows. So just to make you safer as far as security, privacy, tracking, you know, as long as you're running an insecure operating system, which Windows is insecure, but it's very nature it's insecure because there's spyware built into it from Microsoft because Microsoft wants to spy on you. But at least you can't get rid of the operating system maybe because there's some things you still need to use for work or school, but at least you can get rid of most of the other programs. There's no reason to use the built-in tools or the stuff that ships with Windows because you can replace all of that with free and open source software alternatives and these alternatives are not just lesser alternatives. These are better programs than the ones that ship with Microsoft Windows 10. So I urge you Windows users to try out all of the programs that I mentioned on this video and I'm gonna list all of the programs I mentioned in the show description, plus maybe some others. I'm gonna list a whole bunch of free and open source programs that are available on Windows and they're better software than the programs you're currently using. Those of you that are Linux users and you have friends and family that still use Windows when you spot them using proprietary software, especially things like Google Chrome and the Microsoft Office suite and things like that, unless they really need those programs for very specialized uses and get those people on Firefox, get those people over on LibreOffice. You know, those that have very basic needs as far as image editing, they don't need the Adobe suite, right? Get them on GIMP, get them on Inkscape and when you get them using these free and open source programs, when they finally are introduced to Linux, the programs on Linux are all those programs they're using on Windows because they were using all those free and open source programs on Windows. It just makes the migration over to Linux so much easier. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devin Fran, Arch5530, Akami Channel, Chuck, Claudio, Dylan, George, Donnie, Kill of Devils. I think I got some people out of order. Louis, Paul, Scott, Willie, you guys. I want to thank each and every one of those guys. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. Me installing Windows in a VM is something I would never do, but these guys, I did it for them, all right? The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters on Patreon and if you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Let me delete that VM now.