Greetings,
I've already made a couple of posts in the Installing Software section but I thought perhaps a little info about my LL interests might be useful.
Some 8 years ago got myself a very nice 17" Toshiba Satellite to replace an earlier laptop which ran on Windows XP. The Tosh came with Vista ...which was awful from day 1. Slow, buggy, needlessly complicated and unreliable. I couldn't believe how my supposed upgrade turned out to be so much worse than the old one. Anyway, I was moaning about Vista (I had a lot to moan about) and somebody suggested I try Linux which would speed things up. I had a look at various distros and eventually selected Ubuntu 12.04 as being suited to my limited skillset and knowledge.
From that point, I can honestly say that I haven't looked back. Discovering the speed, stability and ease of use of Ubuntu made me realise that whole MS Windows catastrophe was something I no longer needed to be a part of. I've used almost every version of Windows (in a business setting) starting with 3.11 in '94 through to W10 and imho 3.11 was probably the last truly decent one - being essentially a GUI for MS Dos. When it comes to Linux, I have had similar feelings about Ubuntu in that, over the years, it's gone from being lean and mean to getting increasingly porky and cumbersome ....and that's why LL seemed a good choice. Also, I have a chum who's been lecturing me about LL for the last couple of years and I really needed to him to just shut up
Coming up to date: my lovely but venerable Tosh is still around but 3 years ago I got hold of a Lenovo Thinkpad T520. It's a bit on the heavy side but solidly built and very easy to access for basic hardware issues. Originally it had a single mechanical hard drive and 4gb of ram. Because, unfortunately, I still needed Windows for some programmes, it seemed reasonable to set up my drive as dual-boot. Over time, I'd gone from U12.04 to 16.04 and W7 through W8 to W10 and as I was doing this I was actually making it increasingly complex to set things up in a way that suited me and more importantly easily maintain them, so....
....I realised that if I wanted to make life simple, I needed to put my potential problems into completely different boxes which led me to look how I could physically separate OSs and Storage on the same laptop. Luckily for me, the T520 has both an mSATA port and a DVD drive and so my new set-up is as follows:
Main OS = LL 5.0 on a 30gb mSSD on the internal mSATA - most of it's root with just a few gb for home and no swap.
Secondary OS = W7 pro* on a 120gb SSD replacing the old clunker
Saved Storage = 256gb SSD - caddy mounted in the DVD bay
I'm using MEGA for cloud storage and my day to day work stuff is synced to my PCs through that. I'm using about 30gb out of the 50gb capacity but there's apparently no limit to the number of accounts so I'm fairly ha ppy. I've cloned both OS drives to back-up SSDs and use another SSD for storage back-up for my non-cloud stuff. You can see that if and when I do have a problem, it's just a question of swapping a drive out - which takes a couple of minutes.
I had thought of buying a new machine but it seemed to me that most of the new stuff is much flimsier with some fairly crappy keyboards...and a fair few don't have easily removable batteries - atm I have two. I've increased ram from 4gb to 16gb (the extra really helps for some number crunching real time graphical representation stuff) and so from a hardware standpoint, I'm a happy bunny.
My transition to LL is going OK but apart from my expected idiot mistakes there are some unexpected hiccups which have made things less smooth than my transition from Windows to Ubuntu - and that did surprise me.
....and that's the story so far. I haven't had any real disasters but I've got into the "login loop of death" 4 times already and whilst I have tried a number of the work arounds, none have worked for me and I've ended up reinstalling LL....so I'm getting quite good at that now
*I went back to W7 Pro having dismissed W8 as garbage and struggling with W10 for far too long.
