So this is a weird one,
I recently booted my windows partition on one of my laptops and it decided to destroy my root Linux partition, because … reasons…
I luckily didn’t lose my data/home partition “yet” but I decided maybe it’s time to make this laptop a windows only machine, i have to admit this has its advantages since i would now be able to run some more apps than before. But anyway, I have some questions to clear up
[ol]
[li]I got an SSD to replace the current HDD in it. My laptop came with windows 8 installed, which I later upgraded to Windows 10, would I be able to simply boot a windows 10 installer and install everything or will I have to install windows 8 first and then upgrade?[/li][li]I have no serial number on my laptop anywhere, is that still a thing? I only ever re-installed windows on this laptop from the recovery partition.[/li][li]How can I get Windows to be more productive? I am really used to doing things with one command on Linux, I can install cmder to work around this, but what about software repositories, easy updates and a usable desktop environment? I’m interested in finding ways to make the windows experience closer to the Desktop experience one would get from GNOME for example.[/li][li]Is anyone using the new Linux environment inside windows? Is it usable or would you recommend going with CYGWIN for shell needs?[/li][li]How are your experiences of running Linux in a VM under windows for productive use?[/li][/ol]
A bit of extra background, I am a software developer, and my platform of choice is Java, so i have no obstacles there, i also have another laptop running linux which is my kind of day to day machine so i’m not suffering or anything https://linustechtips.com/main/uploads/emoticons/smile.png
also, games don’t matter much, I know what the system can run and i’ve used it a bit for some linux gaming before but it’s not a factor to consider while optimizing my windows experience.