I'm Scottish and retired to Cyprus 20 years ago but shortly afterwards my wife died so, although approaching 86 and almost blind, I now live alone and rely almost totally on my computer to interface with the outside world.
Despite having grown up with Windows since DOS-6/Win-3.1 days, I've become increasingly pissed off with the mercenary direction M$ is heading - Windows is no longer an Operating System for doing work but has morphed into an Entertainment System for social networking.
In 2008 I bought a book on Linux but the learning curve seemed very steep so I shelved the idea and stuck with Win-XP. My daughter, who works for a software company and speaks fluent C++, requires state-of-the-art hardware and last Autumn bought the latest and greatest and kindly bequeathed me her 'old' (ie 2019!) laptop. It's a Razer-14 and a beautiful machine but... it runs Win-10! Since then I've struggled to find my way around this bloated disaster, with the same functions in different places with different names, and copiously larded with ads at every click.
The thought of grinding my way up the Win-10 learning curve was the final straw - I decided to abandon M$ and install Linux on the Razer. So, using my Win-7 Desktop, I boned up on modern Linux and found that Mint had the GUI most similar to Windows and thus a less-steep mountain for a blind geriatric to climb. I downloaded 21.2 Cinnamon but, before nuking the Razer, decided to dual-boot the desktop and get some elementary Linux experience. Fearful of perhaps losing 35 years of data spread over 18 partitions in three 1TB SSDs, I made clones and backed everything up to external drives.
After the expected trials and errors and with much customising still needed, Mint 21.2 is now installed and dual-booting on the desktop, with on-line access and functioning audio, dual monitors, all my partitions and data accessible, and with RJ45 networking to the Razer. I'm sure that my ancient genealogy program is dead meat in Linux and still have lots of work to do: exporting my bookmarks from my existing FireFox, working out how to access my existing Thunderbird data, plus checking that my printer and scanner work. During installation, do devices require to be switched on so that Mint automatically detects them and loads drivers? Mine were both off at the time.
Despite some minor niggles (such as the lethargic mouse pointer) so far I'm very pleased with Mint, it does what it says on the tin.
So that's my long-winded self-introduction, hope I haven't bored you.
MarRob.
Self-built desktop: Win-7 Pro 64; 3.1GHz AMD 8-core CPU; 8GB RAM; 3x1TB SSD; NVIDIA GTX560 Ti
