SoK/2025/StatusReport/Anish Tak

Win2Linux-Chooser: An app to help migrate from Windows to Linux

Project Abstract

The project aims to help users migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux by analyzing their system specifications, asking relevant questions, and recommending a ranked list of distributions based on their preferences.

Deliverables

• A MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that recommends a ranked list of distributions to the users switching from windows to linux

Mentors

• Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss ([@joseph:kde.org])
• Snehit Sah ([@flyingcakes:kde.org])
• Aakarsh MJ ([@aakarshmj:matrix.org])

Merge Requests

• Questionnaire
• Hardware Classification
• Recommendation engine
• Hardware Info Integration

Weekly Progress

Week 1

• Discussed criteria for recommending distributions.
• Decided to ask 4-5 questions without excessive technical details.
• Explored distributions suitable for beginners, including Kubuntu, Fedora KDE, Linux Mint, and Lubuntu.
• Started working on the recommendation engine logic.

Week 2

• Decided on parameters to rate distributions:

 # Ease of installation
 # Old hardware support
 # Good documentation
 # Community support
 # Updates

• Finalized JSON format for questions and CSV format for distribution weights.
• Chose local processing over server-side for privacy and efficiency.
• Decided to use PySide6 + Kirigami for the project.

Week 3

• Set up the basic repository on KDE Invent.
• Implemented the basic UI.
• Worked on hardware detection using WMI and psutil.
• Discussed filtering methods for the recommendation engine:

 # Agreed on using a cosine similarity model.
 # Treating each distribution as a vector.
 # Calculating similarity with the user preference vector.

Week 4

• Basic recommendation engine operational using dot product; switching to cosine similarity.
• Majority of the desktop client UI completed.
• Improved the questionnaire and refined the algorithm by adding a penalty criterion.
• Researched driver and external hardware support.

Week 5-6

• Narrowed the scope to Win102KDE-Chooser to KDE-based distributions.
• Discussed the driver support, and decided to start with Nvidia driver support and extend it later.
• Improved questionnaire so that questions directly map to parameters which are predefined in distribution vector
• Merged the script which extracts hardware info (uses wmi) from the devices

Week 7

• Implemented the recommendation logic
• Made adjustments to the parameters to refine the recommendation system.
• Used a penalty mechanism for categorical questions, to push certain distributions lower in the list which doesn't match user preference
• Added a mock-ui which shows ranking of distros with there respective scores.

Week 8-9

• Implemented and integrated hardware detection in the recommendation logic.
• Implemented a UI for Hardaware Info Page.
• Begin testing the application on a Windows machine
• Also added an option to skip hardware detection if needed.
• Decided to take Blue Angel Specifications as reference

Blue Angel Specifications (Reference System)
* Model: 2015 Esprimo P920  
* CPU: Intel i5-4590 (4 cores, 3.3 GHz)  
* RAM: 4 GB DDR3 (1600 MHz)  
* Storage: 500 GB SATA III HDD (6 Gbit/s)  
* Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4600