Linux - The Journey
The biggest question any new Linux user faces is.... where do I start...??
What's a GRUB..? WTF is a GNOME ... or a GNU for that matter.....?
Xfce, LXDE, GPL's, FOSS, forks, Arch, Fedora, Upstream !!!! The Linux landscape is vast and the lingo similarly massive. So, how do you start? And how do you get a good footing??
I'm not really sure I can answer either of those questions, but what I can do is tell you about my Linux journey.
Time to choose a distro
In 2018, I found my 6-year-old Macbook Pro's GPU had died. I'd fallen out of love with Apple over the prior few years, due to, what I saw as a lack of innovation. But I was equally still wary of Windows. So I decided to do something I hadn't done in nearly 20 years. To take an old laptop and give it new life by putting Linux on it.
Being totally out of the loop on Linux distros some basic research led me to giving Lubuntu a try!
I now know that this is just Ubuntu Desktop (based on Debian), with LXDE being used as the desktop environment in place of Ubuntu's native GNOME.
Lubuntu
And then it got serious.
Astroberry
When I first saw the desktop above I still didn’t really understand the nature of the kernel and Linux as a whole, but I was starting to grasp its versatility. The screenshot above is from Astroberry. An astronomy and astrophotography based linux distro which I have put to great use on both a Raspberry Pi 3b & 4.
Sadly the project seems to be struggling due to it being built on Debian 10 Buster 32-bit and one of the core programs went 64 bit. It has had me wondering if there might be some kind of Astro Nix OS solution out there. But that’s for another day.
Mint – MATE Edition
By the time time I had capitulated and purchased a Windows 10 based Lenovo laptop. But was still enjoying the fact that I had a nearly 10 year old machine up and running well on Linux. But with the aging CPU and the ever increasing memory requirements of an average distro, I started looking in to lightweight versions. Which eventually brought me to the interesting, anti-capitalist distro Antix. I used this for about a year in total, before deciding to go with a more mainstream lightweight distro.
Antix
Linux Lite
Which brings up to today…. as far as that same laptop. Now nearly 13 years old keeps on going and is running Linux Lite.
But that was just the start. Since then
around with dozens of other desktop distros in Virtual box on Windows and I use Ubuntu server at home on Proxmox. Which itself is a Debian based level 1 hypervisor.
