At that point it had been years since I had used Linux. Back in the college days, in the technological university, the cool kids were the ones using it, we even had an entire subject dedicated to learn it, so that’s what I did. I installed an Ubuntu-based distro in my PC and I tried to familiarize with the OS for all my activities.
But I that didn’t stick and after gaining experience developing in .NET my Linux days were gone.
Needless to say that spending more than ten years without any interaction with the OS made me lose all the knowledge I gain at college and home.
After all that period my next contact with Linux wasn’t installing a distro for my day-to-day PC but rather for a home server. I wanted to set up a server to do just one task at the moment and using Windows would require me to buy a box with certain hardware to run it. Immediately I started to look at Debian requirements and I saw that I would need way less resources but that will make me face a learning curve. I encountered myself in the most common tradeoff we can think of, time vs money.
As I wasn’t worried about having my server running soon I took all the time I could to learn how to install the OS and how to make the setup properly.
I familiarized with the well known and so feared Linux terminal and one day I had my server up and running.
During that moment another situation collided with my hunger to automate a task at home. Working in cyber-security as part of my job made me aware of the security of my devices and how to protect them. Windows users have naturalized the fact that their system can catch a virus at any point just by not paying enough attention to a simple action such as connecting a pendrive or opening a link to a website. This is not such a big problem in Linux as the OS is way less targeted by attackers than its corporative counterpart.
In that moment I raised the big question… What if I switch Linux for my personal Operating System?
The analysis was simple, when I started to list all the activities I did with my PC, the vast majority of them just required a browser. That was it, that was the breaking point for me.
I navigated through different reviews of the distro families that exist out there and which were the most beginner friendly. And after all that I end up choosing Linux Mint.
Mint is an Ubuntu based – which is a Debian based – OS. That made the right linking to me as I experienced with Debian because of my server.
Mint is posed as a distro for Windows users for its similarity and I have to say that’s an accurate description. The transition was very smooth to me, I continued with all my activities once I migrated all my documents and personal files to the new OS.
I didn’t even have to use the terminal at all, nevertheless, I started doing it at a later stage just because of personal choice, but nothing stops me to operate with the system using pure graphical interaction.
I was satisfied with my choice, but always wondering if after a while I should opt to hop to a more complex and Linux-oriented distro. This changed when chatting with some old college friends at my birthday I told them that I started using back that nerd OS. They seem interested and asked me which distro I choose. It was of my surprise that when I say Mint, they told me they were using the same. My friends, die-hard Linux users, were in the same spot than me. Automatically I understood that I will stay for a while in this OS and that time I spent reading reviews and doing my comparisons was well invested.
All in all I haven’t had any issue with my transition and I feel happy for the path I choose. It is worth to mention that the only application I miss is Notepad++. I been using it since college, now mostly for taking notes, and despite some hours spent invested on a search and try, I haven’t end up with any good replacement.
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