Not so 'New' Newbie!
 

Good morning everyone from a wet and windy UK!

As the title bar says, I'm new to this community though not so much with Linux. Briefly, the story so far.

I came to computing with Win 95 and gradually made my way through to Vista. Like a lot of folks (most, I suspect) all I'd heard about was Windows and something obscure called a 'Mac' - which seemed more for hardened professionals - and never a mention of Linux. I'd swallowed the consumerist marketing that said I needed to upgrade to the 'latest and greatest' and did so up to Vista. What a mistake that was! (Although XP wasn't so bad - should've stuck with that......).

Anyway, I used to subscribe to a computing mag which mentioned this 'thing' called Linux and issued a try-out disk (from memory Ubuntu 5?) and whoa! what's this all about?!! TBH, at that time it all looked a bit weird and 'nerdy' so back it went into a drawer, never to be seen again......... Until I happened on a Youtube video of a talk that Linus Thorvalds gave. That was my lightbulb moment. I simply like the ethos of open-source and community driven computing coupled with the fact that my computer is now 'mine' to do with what I will - to change software as I want and am free to pass this on to others. What's not to like?

At first I struggled to get a distro up and running but more through my ineptitude than the distro's! I tried a few early Mints and Ubuntus but Unity nearly put me off forever (just kidding, Unity fans!), finally settling on Mint 17 Cinnamon for the home box - it flies on a 10yr old rig that used to really struggle with Vista - and a variation of others (Peppermint, Zorin and now Tahrpup 6) on a donated laptop and netbook. All good, stable and well capable of anything we need to do. Even my wife, who, panic-stricken when I said I was ditching Windows, "but who will fix it if anything happens to you?" - er, but who would fix Windows honey.....? - uses Linux everyday with no problems.

I read up on as much as I can get my mitts on - guides and tutorials etc - and hopefully my knowledge will grow accordingly. Would I go back? No chance!

Regards to all

Rich

Hello and welcome to the forum :)