So recently I upgraded my computer to something more modern. Jumping seven or so I7 generations has brought my personal development machine from the mid-naughties back to relatively recent hardware. This time I’ve gone for a second hand one owner Dell Precision SFF desktop, which sat on my desk at work for the past 4 years, which was duly purchased when the lease expired.

Microsoft however with all their AI shenanigans incentivised me to make the switch to a Linux desktop permanently. So it was goodbye Windows 10 and hello Linux Mint, more specifically LMDE. I’m no stranger to Linux, having built and maintained Linux systems since the 90’s, but as a desktop, well that is all new.

I chose LMDE in preference to standard Linux Mint after a few arguments with the later versions of Ubuntu and their slow evolution towards snaps, which kept robbing my old laptop hardware of resources. I switched to Linux on my laptop more than six years ago and it’s been great.

For quite a few years I’ve been using and given priority to Open Source apps for my Electronics and Radio development and I was really down to one or two Windows only apps when I switched. Nothing a Virtual Machine booting windows couldn’t solve using Oracle VirtualBox, especially on this machine with newer hardware and enough RAM.

So far I’m impressed with LMDE as nearly everything has worked out of the box, including printing. So much easier than Slackware compiling everything from source back in the day. I was however caught out by secure boot and VirtualBox, which lead to learning’s on the DKMS driver signing mechanisms, which ultimately saved me from NVIDIA Driver horrors; which is the subject of another post I must get around to soon.

It’s now been more than three months since I’ve switched and I’ve not needed to switch back, on-wards and up-wards !