I live in New Zealand and am a new convert to LM and Linux in general. I come from a programming background but these days I mostly just build websites. I had a brief introduction to Unix back in the late 80's but since then nothing much.
I had a 10 year old Windows XP machine at home that was my main desktop machine but it was way past it (running really slow and of course not receiving updates from Microsoft any more) so I decided to get a new computer and make a break from Microsoft and give Linux a spin. I ended up buying a NUC8i5BEH (I really like the small form factor of the NUCs) and popped in 16GB of RAM and a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB SSD. Making the Live USB drive and booting it up was easy enough, although I did run into some problems trying to do a "Something else" partition scheme (probably due to my lack of GParted knowledge, I don't think I got the EFI partition set up properly because the machine reported no OS found when I rebooted). In the end I went back and did an automatic install and then repartitioned it how I wanted.
I've now installed a lot of the software that I want to use (Apache, MariaDB, PHP, Visual Studio Code, Teamviewer, various utility programs, etc). If I get some time I'd like to have a play with the Lua scripting language and Gambas as they both look quite interesting. I'd also like to try out some of the retro computer/game console emulators just to bring back a few old memories.
You'll probably see me asking silly questions on this forum as I get to grips with Linux, and when I see an opportunity to help others I'll do so.
