Hi All
I am an electrical/electronics technician currently working for a F1 racing team in Oxfordshire, in the uk. I am currently living in Swindon, but I am retiring later this year and hoping to move to Cornwall.
Around 2009 I bought a cheap low powered HP laptop running Vista which was ok to start with, then the novelty of my first laptop wore off. My 13-year-old son, who even at this age was showing strong geeky tendencies and was very experimental, keenly suggested installing Linux in the shape of Ubuntu 10.04. It wasn’t until later I realised that he really wanted a guinea pig PC to try this on rather than his. It all went very well, and I've always had a version of linux on my laptop since then.
My son has gone on to become an IT networking engineer working with MS and Apple equipment for education. He uses W10 for his personal use but every now and then I get asked if I have a Linux box he can use for some task, so he is still aware of the advantages Linux has for certain tasks.
I currently have a few years-old HP Pavilion currently running Ubuntu Mate for day to day stuff, and an Acer C710 Chromebook currently running Peppermint 10. The Acer is the laptop I usually try new stuff out on initially and if I like it, it goes on the HP. Generally, in my distro walkabout, which seems to be a compulsory experience for most Linux users, I have always come back to Ubuntu based distros. I did like Crunchbang and Manjaro when I used them but the original Crunchbang development ceased and with Manjaro, I could never quite get comfortable with it for day to day running and maintaining.
I’ve always found the importance and need for me, of a friendly and patient forum. I am, and always have been a noobie as far as software goes. I’m a hardware person and I know that it is always the software that causes the problems (and is the work of satan). So, I have to copy lines of script from web pages and paste into the terminal blindly, not always knowing what I am doing, but relying on the source for being reliable and understand the issue I have. The aforementioned distros had/have good forums, but you need the right sort of distro to go with them hence why I have settled for UM and Peppermint atm. However it could be Peppermint and Peppermint by the weekend.
