Perfect Linux
Just how things have moved on in the Linux world from when I first took an interest in the subject back in the 90s. You didn’t have many variants to choose from in the beginning and you seemed to struggle to find things to put on the CD some months, but I always looked forward to picking up the mag from my newsagent and see what’s new.
My favourite was SUSE at the time, but I tried OpenSUSE and RedHat all with the same fail rates on my 486. I even ran BeOS, which I lost months on trying to get to work. It did in a fashion, but it didn’t have any hardware or software support. I didn’t care, though: I just loved the look of it, which is why I tried so hard, but then BeOS decided to throw in the towel, which was sad but inevitable.
Today I’m 61 and was able to pick up a new laptop and then with very little work have a fully working dual-booting machine with Windows 11 and Linux, in a little less than an hour. This included opening it up, adding a second hard drive and installing more RAM.
I have to say that the Pop!_OS detected everything and made installing a breeze. However I had to do a little command line work to add the Windows boot manager into UEFI Menu, but that was simple to find online and apart from checking that it worked I haven’t booted into Windows since.
At last I can have a machine with all the mod-cons (back-lit keyboard, good battery management) and it will be stable enough for me to work from.
My requirements were a 10 or 11th gen processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM upgradable, HD screen, space for a second hard drive and backlit keyboard. The new Dell
Inspiron 5510 fit the bill and it’s great: light and thin, while still feeling solid. Coming from a MacBook this is high praise. I would have preferred to use Manjaro on the new build, but the live version detected most of the hardware except the sound card, but Pop!_OS did everything so I went with that.
Thank you for keeping us entertained over the years and in the Linux loop, without you I would not have found out about Manjaro or Pop!_OS and may not be where I am now with Linux who knows.
Rob Back
Neil says…
We’d love to take credit for Linux becoming ever-more widespread and easier to use, but I feel there might be other reasons for that happening! It’s great to hear that you’ve finally managed to switch to using Linux as a fulltime OS, even for work. It’s not mentioned often, but I feel that the switch to cloud-based working – a lot of which is powered by Linux under the hood – has enabled workplaces to become less dependent on Windows and proprietary software or tools running on it, although it opens up its own issues.
For work I have to access Windows, MacOS and various GNU/Linux OSes. Windows has just been a constant pain since Windows 8, MacOS has its annoying foibles, but Ubuntu has truly been the dependable workhorse that keeps on happily ticking along.