Back to the good old times – Win 7 for Debian – Mehdy Shinwari

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Back to the good old times – Win 7 for Debian

10. August 2024

ChatGPT? Copilot+ and Recall? AI-Bubble bursting and incoming recession? Dude wake up, it’s 2010, now join the skype call and let’s play some Minecraft.

Sadly, it was not a dream and while we can still play Minecraft (probably using Discord to talk nowadays), the future looks bleak as ever. Personal computing especially takes some hits regarding Windows 11, where it is now necessary to have a Microsoft account and the teasered "Recall" feature. Also for some reason my Windows 10 installation randomly began to just start updating and restarting my PC (losing unsaved documents…) or the file explorer crashing suddenly. Since the support of Windows 10 ends next year on the 14th October 2025 and being tired of this anti-consumer behaviour I was looking for an alternative. While I am too poor to buy a new MacBook Pro with the maxed out M3 chip to transition to the Apple eco system (which has its own downsides) I did the only reasonable thing and choose from now on – to only use my smartphone. Obviously this was a joke, but at this point, rejecting Windows and Mac OS, it has to be some Linux distribution. If you managed to read the title I have decided to try Debian for no particular reason other than not wanting to be an Arch user btw. Having used Ubuntu before via WSL, I thought they should be similar.

But since Windows 10 is still supported till next year and I was not comfortable to commit 100% from the beginning I bought myself a used Dell Latitude (I think it is a great deal). The setup process was really straight forward. This is what I ended up with at the end:

Having studied computer science I heard that it was popular among Linux users to "rice" their desktop enviroments. I think the word is borrowed from the car scene, which refers to adding modifications which have only an aesthetic purpose . So what do I have in mind? The good old times. Which for me atleast were Windows 7. This is how my Debian desktop turned out:

Some parts are not working for me like the login screen is a bit bugged (no wallpaper) or the mouse cursor changing its size when being inside of an application window, but I like it nonetheless. I used the Aero theme for KDE Plasma from wackyideas. There is a theme for Firefox too to get the old look but I did not get it to work. The install guide of the KDE theme is easy to follow but if you are too lazy to read, someone has also made a video tutorial. It was not mentioned in both guides but it is probably nice to know if you want to try the theme: The taskbar is a widget, so you have to "delete" the old taskbar and drag the new taskbar widget in its place (same for the clock/calendar).

Anyway I hoped you enjoyed this less-technical blog post! Because of my bachelor thesis I was busy the last months (which explains the inactivity) but I hope that I can spend now more time on the drone project. See you soon!

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