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Showing posts from April, 2020

Why I moved over to Linux (part 2)

It's nearly the end of April and I've been working from home for over a month, using the laptop running Ubuntu Studio as my daily driver. So what have I been using it for and how has it performed? I've thrown quite a lot of random stuff at the thing over that last 4 months and particularly the last 4 weeks of home working. I've been editing videos for the wife with a few different packages (I think I've settled on Kdenlive for now), trying my hand at music scoring using MuseScore , a lot of work in Google Chrome: email, GDocs, etc. I've been on Slack a lot, and Zoom (as, it seems, has most of the population). I've been developing in various systems and languages: C++ in Visual Studio Code , PHP in Atom and VS Code, Arduino stuff in Arduino IDE, some C# in MonoDevelop , some Kotlin in AndroidStudio . Given the small screen, I've mainly been sitting on the sofa with the laptop plugged into the telly and using Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for remo

Why I moved over to Linux (Part 1)

Ok, so this is planned to be the first in a (probably short) series of posts covering why my fancy laptop is now running Linux. To give you a bit of background, I currently have 2 computers in current use at home: a 10 year old Dell that, with a few choice hardware upgrades over the years, is still going strong. This is running Windows 10 1903 and is currently suggesting I update to 1909. I am hesitant to do this because... My other PC is a fairly fancy, super-slim Acer laptop that I bought about 5 years ago. This had Windows 8 point something installed on arrival, but thankfully the free Windows 10 upgrade arrived soon after the laptop did. All was well. Until May last year when Windows 10 1903 dropped, promptly disabled the audio and broke Windows Update. Having a but of a tech background, I managed to get the audio up and running again, but Update was bust, so no security updates, etc. Far from ideal. When the 1909 update arrived in November I went through the whole manual upd