The culmination of a decade
In 2016 I was 11 years old. I had the lowest-spec laptop from 2011, which was running Windows 8. It was slow. Really slow. And I was really into computers, so I wanted to do something about it.
My bright idea was to reinstall Windows. Which seemed like a great idea, since I had done it on an IBM ThinkPad R41 half a dozen times, using the product key on the bottom. What I did not realize, however, was that my laptop did not have a product key on the bottom.
Basically, I had bricked my computer. And because my dad had played around with Ubuntu a few years prior, we had an installation disc for Ubuntu 12.04 kicking around. That’s what got me back to having a usable computer again.
I didn’t just have a working computer though. I had a better computer, at least than Windows 8 ever was. It was faster, it looked cool, and I could use the terminal to do stuff, which made me look like a hacker. My friends thought it was cool, and so did I!
I eventually updated to 16.04, because 12.04 was nearing it’s end of support, and it was (at the time) the most recent LTS release. It, too, was excellent. I was totally into the linux community- I read news sites, I tried out other distros on a second partition, and I was basically just super excited about computers. I took extremely old computers and tried to get them running with some variety of linux, and while I loved it, I often failed.
All of my school work, from 2016 to 2019 was done on that HP Pavillion G4. In 2019, my parents got me a new laptop, with Windows 10 on it. Concurrently, I began high school, and was forced to use a Chromebook. My old linux laptop was set aside, by the wayside, and forgotten about. For nearly 6 years, I used either Windows 10 or ChromeOS for my day-to-day computing.
And then, in college, my Windows installation gave me the BSOD while I was working on editing a video. A few months prior, I had switched my grandma’s computer over to Linux Mint, since it couldn’t upgrade to Windows 11.
Side note about that: My grandma is the least techie person I know, and she has been using Linux Mint for about a year. She still calls me and asks little questions, but for the most part, she’s had very few problems.
When my Windows 10 install gave up the ghost, I figured it would be easier to help my grandma with tech support if I ran Linux Mint on my comuter too. So, that’s exactly what I did.
Now, I exclusively use Linux Mint on my laptop. I run a server on a Core2Quad PC in my basement (which this website is hosted on), and that server is using some variant of linux (which I will not name, as a security precaution).
Switching to linux, for me, was originally a matter of problem-solving. Staying on it, back in 2016, was just because I thought it was cool. Now, in 2026, I still think it’s cool, but the stability I’ve gotten from Linux Mint (and especially the usefulness of TimeShift) have made it less of a hobbist choice and more of a practical decision.
If you’re thinking about switching, I’m clearly going to suggest you do. I’ve loved linux for a long time, and it truly has matured a lot since I first started using it. There are problems still, don’t get me wrong, but I had problems when I used Windows too. Also, I don’t want Microsoft to force me to have an account, so I probably won’t switch back!
Speaking of computers knowing too much about us, have you heard about age-verification laws? They’ve proposed one in Illinois, and every voice matters in fighting against it!
Leave a Reply