Goodbye Bill

I've finally done it. I'm gone, outa here, finished with it. I'm no longer a Windows user.
In my life this is huge. I've had windows since before it was windows. The MSDOS days of the '80s. Flexibility, convenience, feature, compatibility, price, Bill Gates was always the winner. Well mostly.

My first computer was actually an Atari ST. I have to say It served me well. Plenty of software for not so serious purposes but at work the DOS machines were unrivalled. The lock-in was super compelling. No way could or would you whip up a program, spreadsheet or document on your ST and then bring it to work on a floppy disk to upload on the work desktop beast. It had to be Microsoft all the way. But not any more.

It started with a small niggle. My anti virus was misbehaving. The machine was sluggish. Disk and file access was incredibly slow. 'Not responding' was becoming the curse of my life.

I went through the process. Researching and trying different solutions.

A full reboot was on the horizon when I read a simple statement on a blog. 'I use Linux Mint these days'.

I had tried various Linux incantations before. They were terrible. Sure the bash shell was like the MSDOS command line but everything was just too hard. There was no software to do the thing I wanted to do. But upon investigation I noticed a few things had changed. Your test system could now be booted from a USB stick. The software was better, no it was the same. Firefox, Libre/OpenOffice, Blender, Gimp, Audacity, VLC were all programs I frequently use. There they were, either part of the test system or available in the repository. But the biggie was the fact that my network shares were there and ready to go. Hurrah for MYCloud.

I tried Mint out on a windows 7 laptop. It worked like a charm. I notice a lot of work done by the Ubuntu/Mint people to include NTFS and Samba shares. Great.

This made me a little overconfident when I tackled my newer but broken win8.1 machine. A little more work to get this to a useable state and more to do unless I want to change a BIOS setting every time I want to swap back to windows. But I don't. More to do sorting out the fact that most of my USB pen drives are detected but unreadable. More to do if I want to use the touchpad or get the thing to sleep/hibernate when I ask it to.

But I have workarounds for all these niggles and more to the point, my broken computer is fixed. It's only a mouldy little back to school Celeron job but it is flying compared to how it behaved on Bills software.