Linux Mint

As I said here when the disastrous meltdown occurred, I've ditched Windows and switched to Linux Mint; a downstream variant of Ubuntu. The decision was relatively¹ easy.

My first thoughts...

... were largely unprintable. I defy anyone confronted by a stubbornly dead-in-the-water PC to think much in the way of charitable thoughts for the first couple of minutes! Make a cup of tea instead. And don't panic. It's only a lump of metal and a few bits of not-very-smart sand, after all.

Now, I'm only a lazy semi-intelligent primate, so I admit I did briefly consider just hopping out to get a new disk and Windows licence. But (a) that costs money, and (b) what's actually keeping me on Windows when all's said and done? Very few of my set of Windows applications have no direct Linux equivalents:

• CD ripping (Asunder)
• database (SQLite)
• desktop searching (Recoll) absolutely indispensable as a memory aid
• DTP² (Scribus and LaTex)
• email (Thunderbird [and web-based Gmail])
• file archiving and compressing (tar)
• file editing (UltraEdit — worth the cost)
• image creation and manipulation (the GIMP [bitmaps] and Inkscape [vector artwork])
• image viewing (Eye of MATE)
• media management, playback and display (Kodi)
• MP3 playback (VLC, mplayer, Clementine)
• Music meta-tagging (Quod Libet)
• NAS access (initially Samba — latterly just mounting NFS shares)
• OCR (Tesseract)
• PDF viewing (Evince)
• printing (HP LaserJet Pro MFP M125a is well-supported)
• scanning (Epson Perfection V550 Photo is well-supported using XSane, via the GIMP)
• spreadsheets,³ document creation, editing, and printing, and (heaven forbid!) presentations (Libre Office)
• SSD trimming (baked into Mint)
• SSH server file transfers (FileZilla)
• video playback (VLC)
• video transcoding (HandBrake)
• web-browsing (Firefox)
• web-serving (lighttpd)

That just leaves file and system backup and who does that these days? :-)

Footnotes

¹  Difficult decisions are easy when there's a loaded gun pointed at your head. Or when (for no discernible reason I or two of my guru chums could pinpoint after about 12 hours of intensive investigation) your 480GB Windows system SSD fails. It was the last straw.
²  I haven't had any serious need for DTP since about 1995 when a little thing called the Web came along and I became IBM's first Java webmaster.
³  Last time I used a spreadsheet to any serious purpose (and I don't class listing my MP3s in that category) was when I played out some financial "What if?" scenarios when I was deciding how much of my IBM pension to take as a tax-free lump sum in late 2006.