> Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?
First: "safe" and Windows never ever matched. Not in Windows 98, not in Millenium, not in Vista. Not ever.
I, reluctantly, after having confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and replacing it with a Chromebook about two years ago (which still works fine for her btw), ordered her a new desktop PC six months ago, running Windows 11.
Six months.
Six months is all it took for this piece of shit to become infected to the point of being unusable. Malware over malware took over: whatever 0-click or 1-click exploit in Edge that took over the machine and tells her to call indian scam center to help her "get her PC rid of viruses", blinking left and right, covering half the screen.
In other words: good old Windows. It's 20-fucking-25, nearly 26, and Microsoft still cannot ship an OS that's not rooted when a grandma is browsing for less than six months.
Pathetic.
Windows is a mediocre piece of insecure (and now spying) turd.
I fully agree with you: reliable Linux distros are the Windows replacement.
And as we've reached a point where everyone except some part of the corporate world can do everything they need from an Android smartphone and these same people are just fine with a Linux distro on their laptop or desktop, people can be switched. And some are. And the numbers of "desktop Linux" users are slowly but surely growing.
I don't care about the snarky "2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop". Linux conquered everything: all the servers, all the routers, 500 of the world top 500 supercomputers, etc. Linux shall conquer the laptop and the desktop too.
And those who don't switch have two choices: MacOS (pricey hardware) or be slaves to that turdery on bits that Windows is.
P.S: actually I don't even care: be it Linux or MacOS or BeOS or Atari's TOS: anything but Microsoft.
Windows security is just fine. The problem is that many users are willing to uncritically install anything they get asked to, even to the point of directly installing malware when "Microsoft support" contacts them asking them to do so. Absolutely nothing about Linux or any other general purpose OS protects against this threat vector, and if Linux had the market share Windows does you would be saying the exact same stuff about your grandma getting rootkits on her Ubuntu box. Mobile devices protect against this scenario by not trusting the user and heavily restricting what apps can do, but that's not a good model for a general purpose computer.
You can lock down Windows too, you can restrict it to Windows Store only, you can allow only whitelisted apps to be installed, you can lock down user permissions, ...
I gave her an iPad Owh, 10 years ago? And I’ve never had to troubleshoot her system ever again. No spyware. No viruses. Nothing.
The worst that happened recently is that the Starlink antenna had te be realigned after a particularly heavy wind blew it off the roof almost.
Oh and her printer needed new toners after printing for x years without problems.
If you want inkjets, buy those with ink tanks. More expensive up front, but operating cost is so cheap. And no more "you have to replace a whole cartridge just because Magenta is low"; if Magenta is low, buy a bottle of Magenta, and fill.
For laser printers, buy those whose toner cartridges are separate from the drum, and those whose toner cartridges can be reset mechanically. And refillable.
Mine is... 15+ years old? I replaced the toner once. And it doesn't have Ethernet or WiFi, so I bought Printopia for my iMac (to which it's attached) to enable AirPrint.