My journey with Linux
The story begins when my second Macintosh desktop got too old and the operational system could not be updated anymore. I didn’t have the dough to buy a new Mac. Must have been around 2010. I had an eMac and I found out Ubuntu Linux could be installed on it. I believe the distribution was 10.04.
I had had a root (administrative) user account on my Mac OS. So I got enraged when starting by configuring the root user account didn’t seem even possible in Ubuntu.
I called an IT guy. Together we managed to install the distro and even configure the root user. Pooh.
Alas, soon Canonical, the parent company for Ubuntu, decided to drop support for PowerPC’s. So I seemed to be again out of luck.
Then began my wandering along the route of PC’s. I bought all kinds of cheapo computers, the low end ones did cost 30 euros per piece, if I remember right.
My first Linux pc was a salvaged one that the local recycling center sold for maybe 50 euros. It had preinstalled Ubuntu. I managed to blow that up very fast by pressing repeatedly Ctrl-Alt-Del every time a freeze occured.
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Then I had err, something. Some kind of pc’s. And I tried Fedora, Slackware (with no other luck than the ability to wipe the hard disk of former distribution), SuSe, Mint. But I hated Mint at that time. Because I couldn’t configure it the way I wanted. I tried many different distros, some of them worked , some not. I kinda liked Debian.
Then came CentOS. It worked precisely like RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) -at the time. I loved it. And I loved the Red Hat manuals, which were available for free on the web.
I never got very proficient on CentOS, but could teach my not very techy wife to update her OS using the command line.
Then, bam! I had money to buy an iMac and forgot Linux for over 10 years. Until by reading Medium articles, I started to question Apple’s superiority in everything computer related. Now, don’t get me wrong: I still like my MacBook Air. It’s just that Apple stuff with decent specs is quite costly compared to my budget.
I at first installed Xubuntu (a flavor of Ubuntu for older or lower specification computers) on an old HP laptop. That was quite a bitter experience, one reason might have been my cat jumping on the keyboard during the installation.
Then I read about Lenovo ThinkPads from Michael Swengel’s articles and got interested again. I bought a refurbished T480 and Mint installation media for 250 euros. I even got a two year warranty on the laptop.
I used Google extensively during my installation process and did everything step by step to avoid any ADHD type action while installing the OS.
The result so far: Mint 22.3 “Zena” works like a clockwork. The only problem has been my cat Alina jumping on an inserted USB stick. Ouch!
