I left Silicon Valley North (Ottawa, Canada) on a 2 week business trip to East Africa in Winter 2005 when I was doing Tech Support for HP's 1-800 telephone line (iPAQs, Windows Mobile, laptops, desktops, Outlook syncing issues, etc.). I really enjoyed that job because I was on the front line dealing with customers in the US & Canada...made a lot of good acquaintances during that time, no Asian offshoring call center nonsense back then - yet.
The fabulous weather, amazing scenery, wildlife & GMO-free foods grew on me over here in East Africa, so I haven't been back - yet.
I was a happy Windows XP SP3 user until Windows 7 came out which was really good. It just ran great - no problems at all. But then, Microsoft started to poison Windows 7 updates after SP1 in order to force users over to Windows 8/10, so it started to get bloated and a little unpredictable (some times; you had to know which updates to avoid, etc.).
Well, I wasn't have any of it. So one day around 2017, I had had enough of Windows 7 on my EliteBook and without any hesitation, jumped ship over to Netrunner which is a wonderful & beautiful KDE spin of Debian Testing by Blue Systems who is a major KDE sponsor. I used that for about a year or so, and then shifted to MX-Linux (based on Mepis & AntiX communities) which has now usurped Linux Mint, Manjaro, and Ubuntu as the #1 distro on DistroWatch. There's a reason for that I believe: It's solid, efficient, super reliable & MX Tools makes managing everything about your OS a simple task. Oh, no SystemD either so maybe that's why it's super-reliable while all of the other top distros continue to have a cycle of good/bad releases.
I've played around with desktop Linux way before 2017 though. I loved Mandrake Linux around 1998. Corel Linux & Xandros were also superb. But I wasn't a daily user like I am now. Back then, I was doing my CompSci internship in Toronto, so I experimented a lot when I built my first desktop with an ABIT BX6 motherboard running Windows 2000.
Around 2009, a British expat friend of mine in Nairobi, Kenya moved back to the UK and left me her iBook G4 which had a PowerPC processor. There were no more updates from Apple. So I first installed Ubuntu on it, which was terrific. But then Linux Mint was just coming up & it had more "desktop" polish than Ubuntu, so I ran that until the iBook stopped powering on.
Let me just say that both Ubuntu and Linux Mint were solid back then - light, reliable, no complaints. Today, you get some good releases followed by buggy releases and this, I believe, has affected the entire Ubuntu ecosystem. Hence a major reason why I like to stick with distros that use pure Debian. Looking forward to taking Linux Mint Debian Edition for a spin soon.
I left Silicon Valley North (Ottawa, Canada) on a 2 week business trip to East Africa in Winter 2005 when I was doing Tech Support for HP's 1-800 telephone line (iPAQs, Windows Mobile, laptops, desktops, Outlook syncing issues, etc.). I really enjoyed that job because I was on the front line dealing with customers in the US & Canada...made a lot of good acquaintances during that time, no Asian offshoring call center nonsense back then - yet.
The fabulous weather, amazing scenery, wildlife & GMO-free foods grew on me over here in East Africa, so I haven't been back - yet.
I was a happy Windows XP SP3 user until Windows 7 came out which was really good. It just ran great - no problems at all. But then, Microsoft started to poison Windows 7 updates after SP1 in order to force users over to Windows 8/10, so it started to get bloated and a little unpredictable (some times; you had to know which updates to avoid, etc.).
Well, I wasn't have any of it. So one day around 2017, I had had enough of Windows 7 on my EliteBook and without any hesitation, jumped ship over to Netrunner which is a wonderful & beautiful KDE spin of Debian Testing by Blue Systems who is a major KDE sponsor. I used that for about a year or so, and then shifted to MX-Linux (based on Mepis & AntiX communities) which has now usurped Linux Mint, Manjaro, and Ubuntu as the #1 distro on DistroWatch. There's a reason for that I believe: It's solid, efficient, super reliable & MX Tools makes managing everything about your OS a simple task. Oh, no SystemD either so maybe that's why it's super-reliable while all of the other top distros continue to have a cycle of good/bad releases.
I've played around with desktop Linux way before 2017 though. I loved Mandrake Linux around 1998. Corel Linux & Xandros were also superb. But I wasn't a daily user like I am now. Back then, I was doing my CompSci internship in Toronto, so I experimented a lot when I built my first desktop with an ABIT BX6 motherboard running Windows 2000.
Around 2009, a British expat friend of mine in Nairobi, Kenya moved back to the UK and left me her iBook G4 which had a PowerPC processor. There were no more updates from Apple. So I first installed Ubuntu on it, which was terrific. But then Linux Mint was just coming up & it had more "desktop" polish than Ubuntu, so I ran that until the iBook stopped powering on.
Let me just say that both Ubuntu and Linux Mint were solid back then - light, reliable, no complaints. Today, you get some good releases followed by buggy releases and this, I believe, has affected the entire Ubuntu ecosystem. Hence a major reason why I like to stick with distros that use pure Debian. Looking forward to taking Linux Mint Debian Edition for a spin soon.