Minty Fresh - Intent to Try Linux
I think within the next few upcoming weeks I am going to try out Linux Mint. I was worried about game compatibility, but was reassured by a few people saying that it Mint (and other Ubuntu based distros) are highly game compatible, and I can use Proton or Wine for other things.
I plan on dual booting into it for now and testing it to see what works and what doesn't, and then I'll decide if I want to keep Win10 on the drive as well after this rigorous test. But I'm excited to see how to customize Mint too!
One of my earliest memories of Linux before I even knew what Linux was, I think, is a little humorous. I don't know why this has stuck with me all my life since then but it has.
I was in middle school. Not sure what age exactly, but somewhere between 11-13 most likely. I had an essay to print out that I had completed at some point the night before or in the early morning on my own computer. Except my computer was not connected to the printer downstairs, as it was a hard wire connection.
No problem, I thought. I'll put the document on my USB drive and take it down into my dad's office. It was four in the morning, and he was asleep, but I've snuck down into his office plenty of times to print out pictures of Sesshoumaru and Kikyou from Inuyasha to stick in my binder.
My dad's office at that time was a very small room in the basement. My parents' room was the larger room attached. Normally, one would have to go through the bedroom in order to access the office. However, within the office was a folding door that, honestly, didn't work very well, but the office was carpeted so it didn't really make any noise (besides, my parents sleep with white noise, so they weren't likely to hear anything on the first place). This door provided access to the water heater from the office, even though the water heater could also be accessed even easier from the other side, next to the basement steps. He also used the area between the door and water heater as a small storage spot, but you really couldn't fit much in it.
So, anyway, I was at the time small enough to fit in between the water heater and the steps, carefully go through cardboard boxes, and get into the office. And I did this often enough, but not too often. Mostly when I wanted to print things out.
(Funnily enough, I still have dreams about sneaking into my dad's office this way. I haven't actually been in the office in years, and I think he may have sealed it up in some manner, so it looks pretty much the same as how it did back then in my dreams, complete with five swords on the wall, for some reason.)
So. I'm in the office. I got my USB stick. I wake the computer up, and I'm pretty sure I knew the password to do so. The computer interface looks a little different than I remembered it, and different from my own computer running Windows XP. I remember it appearing more like iOS, but it definitely wasn't iOS. I knew that much.
The computer opens the file just fine. On the print screen, however, it doesn't find the printer. It's not automatically set up. It wasn't even connected to the internet for some reason, so I couldn't even Google some help.
I spend twenty or so minutes trying so hard to configure this to get the printer to show up, but it never does. Since I was doing this before school in the first place, I had limited time. I exited out of all the programs and squeezed between the water heater and stairs again and just ended up telling my teacher my printer was out of ink but I didn't know until last night, when it was too late to get more, so please except the USB stick...
I can't remember how I found out it was Linux. I don't know if I ever asked my dad a few days later, or if months or years later I stumbled upon people talking about Linux and put two and two together.
I do think this experience turned me off from trying it myself. For about fifteen years, I swore I never would try Linux because of this one time I couldn't get an unknown-interface to work at four in the morning on a computer I shouldn't have been at when I was twelve.
But I've become increasingly dissatisfied with Windows, and Microsoft as a whole. I don't know if it's possible to not be dissatisfied. I have installed group policy editors and edited registries just to get it down to the bare minimum telemetry. But it's still there. Despite me explicitly forbidding notifications about new Windows features, the other day, still on Win10, I got a notification about trying out Copilot, which I wasn't even aware was a thing on Win10, too. After that, I truly began to consider Linux.
To my knowledge, a lot of people just don't know there are other options beyond Apple and Microsoft, or they think it's difficult to install so they never even look into whether or not it is actually difficult. They shrug and say, "Well, it just is what it is."
But, you know. It doesn't have to be that way.
With love, Byleth
P.S. I've added a guestbook link up at the top. Feel free to reply if you want to talk about this topic more! If you'd rather email, I've also added a link to an email you may contact me at. Looking forward to hearing from you!