My journey to Kubuntu

[shag00]

It's been a long journey, I am old and retired now but when it started it was on an IBM PC with a single 5.25" floppy disk (no hard drives in those days) and a mono coloured green display, maybe a whopping 12 inches lol. It progressed through a couple of Amiga PCs and then back to Windows powered (Windows 3.1) PCs by which time Compaq was the force to be reckoned with in the PC market. I kept using Windows from 3.1 all the way to now as I still need a Windows PC to run some specialised software that is not available on Lnux.

I decided to jump the windows ship in 2013 largely because of Windows 8 which remains as one of history's greatest dogs of software. After looking around at the alternatives I selected Ubuntu primarily because it appeared to be the best supported OS. As with most anything new there is a learning curve and 5 years later I imagine I am about 10% of the way through the curve. The first Ubuntu PC was a home theatre PC and served as my test bed for using Ubuntu/Linux. Overall, the experience was positive though did entail some frustrating moments. My biggest gripe was and remains the lack of modern, or indeed any, GUIs for many programs.

The trigger to move from Ubuntu to something else was the withdrawal of Unity. The unity replacement was just to clunky, akin to time-warping back 10 years. So the race was on to find a replacement. After much consideration i found a you tube video showing how to customise the Plasma/KDE desktop and I thought to myself that's it and so I migrated one of my PCs to Kubuntu. I am now on Kubuntu 18.04.01 and I have to say that my experience with Kubuntu has and is very positive. Having a modern feel to the desktop and things happening as you would more or less expect them to. I am amazed that Ubuntu did not adopt Plasma after ditching Unity as it is light years ahead in usability and feel.

So the real showdown is between Ubuntu, clunky old feel operating system and Kubuntu, a cheery modern feeling operating system. Result: hands down win to Kubuntu. Best wishes to all those that make Kubuntu happen.

[kc1di]

Welcome aboard

[Kennycm]

Went through much the same process. I too am age challenged though I have TRS80 to today experience my memory is not as good as it used to be. The latest was from Lubuntu to Ubuntu to Kubuntu. I agree Kubuntu is hands down the best distro for me. All the distros I have used over the years had good points and bad points but the latest distros are really superior. I love to tweak and 18.04.1 is really boring, works so well I am having trouble finding things to tweak :-) Running a Dell 5570, i5 8th gen, 8 gig mem and with a hard drive.

[GreyGeek]

Welcome, shag00, from another grey hair who turned 77 a little over a month ago. (Inside is a tired 28 year old struggling to get out! ) I retired from a career of teaching math, physics, chemistry, biology and earth science (major hours in all, with teaching certificates), and later programming, in 2008.

My PC journey began in the late summer of 1978 when I bought the first Apple ][+ sold in the state of Nebraska. Teaching at the time, I taught myself Apple ][+ BASIC so I could write a grade book program, a math drill program, and some physics simulations. Within two years the tail started wagging the dog and I began selling Apples in 1980. My commission on one sale of an Apple with two Disk ][ drives, a monitor and a Centronics 749 line printer was more than what I made per month teaching school. Software was in short supply so I quit selling computers and begin writing and selling software for the next 15 years.

In September of 1998 I saw an ad in a computer mag for the SuSE distro, which featured the KDE 1.0 Beta release. I had been running RH 5.0 since May of that year as my personal OS, but for business all of my clients were running Windows so I coded in Windows. Switching from RH to Windows caused mental dissonance and I wanted to avoid that. KDE gave me the ability to configure its desktop to look & feel just like Windows, without the incessant Windows crashing. I started using cross platform tools and coded in Linux and compiled on Window for my clients. The Qt API, on which KDE is based, was the best tool to make that as easy as possible.

Every since Kubuntu 9.04, when I first started using Kubuntu, the KDE desktop has been the fastest, most powerful and flexible desktop I've every used, and I have used most them.

I am currently running BIonic on an Acer V3-771G 17" laptop with i7, an HD3000 Intel video and an Nvidia GT 650M secondary video, and 16 GB of RAM. The Nvidia chip cannot be set to the primary in the BIOS but the nvidia-390 driver makes it the primary. It has one SSD main drive and two spinning 750GB HDs for archive purposes. Bionic is installed on top of Btrfs as the root file system. I will NEVER run another distro that does not allow the easy installation of Btrfs as a root file system.

This forum, browsing, email and playing Minecraft and Universal Sandbox^2 are my primary uses of it.

[shag00]

I had to laugh when I read these responses, I thought I would be the odd man out, being old and barely competent in Linux but loe and behold the forums have a few baby boomers running around, although apparently somewhat better versed in linux than I. As far as hardware is concerned I thought I might apprise you of my latest acquisition for the PC I have running Kubuntu. For the first time ever, I, this week, I bought and built a PC based on a AMD processor. It was a Ryzon 2600X with a Asus B450-Plus motherboard. Also got my first M2 "SSD". This is all new to me and maybe you have seen or heard of these things and are interested to find out more. My opinion, they are all good stuff. Of stand out interest to me was the realisation that the stock AMD cooling system is a big step ahead of Intel's version, AMD use spring loaded metal screws to secure their cooler rather than the pretty ****ty plastic lugs used by Intel. As this PC is a medium/light duty machine I may not need a after market cooler, will wait and see. I re-used my 1050 GPU from the old rig and find it works very well with the NVIDIA drivers.

I also have 2 x 2TB HDDs installed which were surprisingly difficult to install, Kubuntu told me the partition tables were corrupt but I think maybe there is a problem there as 2 corrupt partitions at once is highly unusual. All said and done I find this rig with the latest Kubuntu is one of those rare moments where the end product exceeded my expectations.

I am pretty much the only near literate computer user in our household so basically I look after 4 PCs, 3 for personal use, mine, my wife's and my son's plus a server (home theatre) which my older children who live by themselves can access.

I am now just hoping that between Wine and some more/new native applications for Linux I can finally ditch my main Windows PC for Kubuntu. Their (Windows) update system which cannot be fully blocked just enrages me every time it gets into my PC as it always resets my LAN and introduces new headaches to it.

I am an accountant by training so please bear with me if I ask some uneducated questions as everything I know about PCs is self taught.

[oldgeek]

My experiences with computing are varied, even though I have a master's in English and have never taken a computer course. My first experience with computing was in 1969 during a university Finite Mathematics course. Our teacher brought in his 'portable computer', which was a typewriter with a roll of paper as the monitor and a relatively small CPU--I don't remember its memory capacity, but it ran on BASIC for us and I got a chance to program a few simple 'apps'. In the 1970s I worked as a technician in Computer Output Microfilm companies and even had a secret classification in San Diego when I worked on Navy microfilm. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 in Peru, where I moved in 1980 after meeting a wonderful woman whom I am still married to after over 37 years. I had to buy books and type in BASIC code in order to get things to work, but it was a nice learning experience. My biggest accomplishment with this was when I translated an Apple program into Sinclair BASIC in order to reproduce the track and brightness of Halley's comet in 1986. After that I switched to an Atari 800 XL, which was a pretty good computer for its time, much like the Commodore 64, and by the time I finished with that I had learned to use disk drives and had expanded the memory to 256K (from its original 64K) using SpartaDOS. There was no good Atari store here, so I had to depend on pirated programs, which included programming using Pascal and C. Atari left Peru and 8-bit computers went by the wayside so I ended up with a 486 PC clone, with a 70 mb hard disk and Windows 3.2.

I stuck with Windows, including 95, 98, and XP, until I discovered Linux on one of these computer CDs found in some software magazines, which included Ubuntu 8.04. I tried that (strictly live CD) for awhile then went ahead and installed it, and rather liked it. Later I switched to Kubuntu to try it out, and liked that better, and so dropped Ubuntu and stuck with dual booting--Windows 7 to Windows 10 (no Windows 8 for me) and Kubuntu all the way to 16.04, which I altered by adding Neon repositories to get a hybrid. I finally said goodbye to Windows after I retired from teaching and installed Kubuntu 18.04, which is working fine when I don't mess with it. I now have time to check out a lot of distros using Virtual Box, most recently Elive (wouldn't recognize internet) and I am amazed at all the progress that has been made since I wrote my first BASIC program with my math teacher in 1969. I'm now 68 and although I no longer need a computer as a work machine, it is a nice hobby and a useful tool for checking out almost everything. And this Forum is obligatory daily reading--great contributors who have expanded my knowledge and helped me solve problems--or at least to live with them.

[GreyGeek]

My into to programming was Fortran IV in grad school in 1967. I never programmed again until I bought an Apple in 1978. After teaching myself BASIC I began to teach BASIC to high school teachers for college credit as part of their continuing education program. One of the programs I wrote was, at the request of the HS wrestling coach, a scoring program for a 16 team wrestling meet. For three days a guy watch me run the program and display scores and ranking on a big projection. He asked if I could re-write that program to score and rank 248 teams in four divisions for the state wrestling meet. I told him all I needed to do was expand the limits of some arrays I was using. Everything, program and data, fit nicely on two 5.25 Apple ][ floppy disks.

My son and I went to thestate meet. He was in the 9th grade at the time and I let him run the computer. The printout was posted on the wall next to the computer and the local TV station put a permanent camera pointing at it during the week the meet took place. The TV station interviewed us and after that Interview my phone rang off the hook. Within a year circumstances demanded that I quit teaching and sell Apples & write software full time. I gave that program to the coach to use. Fifteen years later visiting in a school 150 miles away from that town I had taught in, the coach came to me and asked if I could remove some lines from the printout of "his" wrestling programs. Those lines were my name, address phone number and copyright, which were poked into memory during the start up as hex code, and automatically appeared at the end of every page of every printout by that program. Back in 1979 I had great expectations for the use of computers in education, with apps like Plato, and AI, but it became very clear that after 15 years computers were being used to teach typing and browse the web. Most teachers did not know how to program and most school budgets could not afford high quality educational software. The computer revolution in education fizzled out with a whimper.

Today, because of smartphones, kids are more savvy that 10-20 years or more ago, and this year my 12 year old grandson was given a chromebook by the school system to use for the entire year. They are using LibreOffice to write homework papers, do Internet research, run simulations and in some cases do modeling. Interestingly, they cannot use their smartphones during school hours. They are locked in the home room teacher's desk until the end of the school day.

[woodsmoke]

Welcome and DO NOT be a stranger or I will have to sic Matilda on you!

woodsmoke