Loving Ubuntu 16.04

So excited about Ubuntu, I had to share my story!

Last week I decided to clear out some old items in the garage and stumbled across an old laptop I'd forgotten about for years (a Toshiba Satellite with a Celeron M 1.6Ghz processor, 60GB HD, 256mb Ram). It is over 10 years old and was a budget laptop even when I originally purchased it new. I plugged it in and hit the power button and was surprised that it booted right up. I wasn't surprised when the login screen was oversized and I couldn't see what to click to try to actually log on. After multiple failed attempts, I determined a full OS re-installation was in order. The problem was that I no longer had a DVD copy of Windows XP, the OS on the laptop. So I grabbed a Win 7 DVD and tried that only to crash almost at the outset. I looked online and saw some recovery/boot DVD's available for Win XP, but they cost $20 and I doubted the laptop was even worth $20 at this stage. That's when I did a inteet search for recycling old laptops and landed on a page that said something like "before you toss that old laptop into a landfill, consider recycling it instead by breathing new life into it with a Linux distro". I was instantly curious. I liked the conservation idea of resuscitating vs adding to a landfill. And I thought if I could get this old gal up and ruing without paying a dollar, I might actually be able to sell it or donate it.

Well, with 256mb Ram, I was limited. I wanted to be able to actually install the OS on the hard drive, so after some further inteet research, I first tued my attention to Zorin OS 9 Lite (found an article that said it was good for old laptops with original XP installs). After multiple attempts and (including letting the DVD chu for 24 hours), I was unable to get a successful install. I was about to give up and default to Puppy or TinyCore when I remembered I had another old Toshiba Gaming Laptop in the garage that I'd retired after the graphics card had a meltdown). I opened this newer Toshiba up and pulled out the RAM and hard drives. I was partially lucky in that the Ram was compatible (hard drives were not). Swapping the Ram out bumped me up to 2 GB's. That solved all my installation problems. It took minutes before Zorin OS 9 Lite was up and ruing. However, now my curiosity was really piqued, so I continued to read about distro's. I saw that Ubuntu had just release 16.04 and I really liked the color scheme and look. I decided to just try several Distros and see what would run and look the best on the old laptop. I took a look at a some other light distros first such as LXLE and Linux Lite. These were decent. I tried Zorin OS 9 Core. That's when I came to Ubuntu. I started with Lubuntu and it ran well. Lastly, I looked a Manjaro Xfce, Mint Xfce, Mint Mate, and Xubuntu. I actually liked all of these and was very impressed with the development of each flavor. I can tell that each will have an audience. But as for me and my old Toshiba, I really felt I hit the sweet spot on my old laptop with Xubuntu. I really couldn't believe how good my decade old laptop looked on it, and how well it ran. And I didn't have to load a single driver or troubleshoot a thing. And now I've got a laptop I don't have to get rid of, because I can pass it on to one of my kids. I couldn't be happier and I have to say, I just really had a lot of fun. I was like a kid in a candy store trying out distros and discovering Linux.

So once I had a taste on a very old laptop, I just had to keep going. I popped a hot swappable SSD drive into a convenient exteal port on my regular PC and stepped up to Ubuntu and Mint Ciamon. I made my SSD drive dual bootable with both distros and have been spending the past few days exploring both. And I really love both. But in the end, I love the entirely new look and feel of Ubuntu. My Mint distro is fantastic and really looks pretty much like my traditional windows desktop, and I certainly like that aspect. But when one of my kids walks into the room, they know I'm into something completely different when Ubuntu is up and ruing on my screen. I will probably keep and use both, but my top pick of every Linux distro I've seen so far to date is Ubuntu, and I've had so much fun and excitement with it, I just had to tell my story.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! I'm proud to join the Ubuntu Linux community!