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PortableApps

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
Administrator
For those afraid of upgrading orgies - ever since I sidegraded my "core" applications to PortableApps, moving to a different operating system (or upgrading computers) is now a question of 15 Minutes. Just copy all "my documents" plus the PortableApps root folder over to the new machine. That's it.

For the really nasty (read: business critical) stuff I have virtual machines that are transferred just as easily. Gives me enough headroom to tinker with native installs.
TTT made this comment about 6 years ago. I was reminded of it, today, when I suggested to saxhound to use PortableApps, from the website of the same name, to test a login problem.

* PortableApps are great and cool and stuff, if you're using them at home. If you're trying to use them at work, they're probably blocked by IT policy. I also recommend scanning anything you download with your favorite antimalware program, first, before running it.
* Virtual Machines (VMs). Allow me to elaborate a little.

I have a FREE Oracle VirtualBox VM that runs Linux Mint XFCE. I have all the apps I use for Internet access installed on it. It's 100% malware clean. I clone that VM for when I want to do something specific, like banking and paying bills. Takes about 5 minutes to make a clone and I use the "Fixed Size" hard drive version . Mind you, I have about a year-old quad-core Kaby Lake I7 that runs at 4.2GHz and speedy SSDs. I've also tested: if I give the VM four of my 8 "virtual" processors and 10gb of my 16gb of RAM, that VM runs just as fast as if I just installed Linux Mint as a stand-alone OS. I've also gotten it down to about three or four tasks that I have to use Windows for. A couple of those tasks I have to do daily, so I can't completely go to Linux, even if I wanted to.

Note that I went through at least a half-dozen Linux distributions before settling on Mint XFCE. It's got the best blend of stability, support, ease of use, speed, and prettiness. Also, considering it's based off or Ubuntu, there are a ton of apps for it and those apps are relatively easy to install. Official screenshot attached. It looks a bit better in person. You can also check out the following YouTube video:

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xfce.png
 
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