This site has been much neglected! It’s been about four years since I’ve posted anything here and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge. But, as a followup on my last post, I can report that after four years, I’m still using Ubuntu MATE as my daily driver GNU/Linux distro.
I’m still using the same i5 laptop as my main machine, but, over the last few years I’ve bumped up the RAM to 8 gigabytes and I’ve swapped out the hard drive for a 500 GB drive.
I’m now running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well.
What can I say, it just works!
I’ve got access to the extensive Ubuntu software repositories, and if something is missing or not up-to-date I can just add a PPA. And, now there are the new kids on the block, “Snap” packages and “Flatpaks“.
Many of you who are currently running Windows 7 will hit the “end of life” wall in January, 2020. After that, you’ll have to switch to Windows 10 if you want to stay in the Microsoft world. But, you might not be running hardware that will handle it.
Certainly I wouldn’t want to touch Windows 10 with anything less than 8 GB RAM and 16 GB would be better. I honestly don’t care what the folks at Microsoft tell you.
Lucky for me I’ve only had to deal with Windows 10 on other people’s machines and quite frankly, it’s a mess of ads and other crapware constantly popping up at you. When you first set it up you’ll spend at least an hour shutting crap down and turning stuff off.
So, if you’ve got some kind of early vintage 64 bit computer with two to four gigabytes of RAM, I’d seriously take a look at Ubuntu MATE. It could mean the difference between buying a newer computer and keeping you’re old computer running!
