Before & After & Inbetween

I've changed my primary email address, my synced online calendar and task list, my preferred search engines, and the OS on my computers. Not because the U/NSA and their pet-Brits along with New Zealand, Australia, and Canada(?) -- I've lost track who all's interested in my on- and offline life besides my own government -- but because through this ongoing scandal, I learned about a lot of alternative services and I'm a curious person.

( longish, hopefully informative rant with reasons )

...is taken!

I'm writing this from my freshly installed and configured Linux Mint Debian system on my main computer, after spending the day nitpickingly customizing away all the annoyances that made me run from Windows in the first place. Nice. Really nice. Now.
(I admit I'd have been done on Saturday, if I hadn't played through all the obvious settings and edited the hidden config files finding out what did what, and then decided to "play it safe" and do a second clean install, on which I then used only what worked out well - so that there's no experimental fuck-upery left).

Overall, most of my hardware worked out of the box (or off the Live-DVD, to be precise), only my 2nd screen (hdmi) needed a new driver and the soundsystem a reminder that its a-okay to only use one set of speakers (namely those on the hd-screen and not the tweety-ones in the laptop itself). The pressure sensitive pen & touch tablet works like a song, calibre is set up, the scanner works... basically everything I expected to give me trouble is fine (and I'm no longer blinded by way too white desktop themes! Darkblue with transparency and glass anyone? :)))).

Two issues remain to be addressed: my printer is currently "on strike", but the scanner - a part of the same machine! - works like a song. The printer works from my test linux laptop, so I hope I can just look for what differences crept in here. And two of the tertiary function keys of my illuminated keyboard don't work. However, I think I can live without starting my oft-neglected messenger app via keyboard, so... *SHRUG*, I had more troubles configuring Google & Bing off the vendor presets in Windows.

Overall, a busy but enjoyable weekend, resulting in a very nice (and nicely improved computational interface).

I iz a happy (and next week will see some serious writing/editing again)!

I finally leaped the (OS)- divide and installed a Debian-based Linux Mint on my old work laptop [Samsung Q45, approx. 5-6 years old, former WinVista machine].
Installation went smooth, all important features work, and the experience on program level is good (though admittedly the Q45 is the oldest & most harmless of my machines). I set it up with three partitions (system, data, swap). My more "exotic" periphery - such as printer/scanner combination, graphics tablet, etc - took a little more figuring out, mostly due to an unfamiliar interface and mismatching documentation. However, I got everything working in less than two hours. Decidedly nice when compared to the time it takes in Windows when "plug&play" and "out of the box with driver" fail you there! The books "Linux 2013" by Kofler and a very easy introduction "Linux Mint System Administrator's Beginner's Guide" by A. F. Montoro were very helpful, the first containing the knowledge, the latter the easy example.

Since every important bit of hardware is running now, all that's left to do is figuring out how to secure the system and operate it safely (basically, learn what I do), and hunt down the software alternatives for the (very few) proprietary programs I'm still using.

Annoyingly, there seems to be no way for Amazon's kindle app (though Calibre works like a song!). Maybe I'll look into Wine later (and the presentation laptop will stay Win for the time being, anyway.) ;)

Anyway, overall: a solid "THUMPS UP" so far. :)