Lighter still

19 April – ?? May 2026

The end of Windows for me

The evening of 15 November 2018. For many months on end, Windows 10 tries to force its ‘Spring Creators Update’ upon me. But it never succeeds: after about 15 minutes (perhaps shorter, but it feels like at least 15 minutes) the update ends at 30% completed, in an unhandled exception, the nature of which has never become clear. In another wasted quarter of an hour, in which the computer cannot be used, the changes are rolled back, so the Hewlett&Packard Pavilion laptop I’m using, bought on 2 July 2016, is back at a Windows 10 release dating from mid or end 2017.

That fatal evening it’s worse: the rollback also fails. There’s an endless loop of attempts the situation. Switching the computer off by holding the on-off switch depressed doesn’t help: it just starts over.

So I switch to a backup computer, a Packard Bell bought 2 April 2015. It has Windows 8 on it, which doesn’t get that annoying update.

I kept using that older computer until 26 July 2019. Another disastrous incident: I let the laptop slip off my lap, causing it to hit the floor hard on one corner. The system offered a diagnosis and reverting it to an earlier Windows version, but that never succeeded.

At that point I made a decision: to finally say goodbye to MSDOS and MS Windows, OSes I had never liked but had been using since 1990, when I switched to a different employer after five years with Nixdorf Computer, where in 1985 I had got to know Unix. Despite those almost 30 years of missing UNIX, I was still familiar with it, because I as using several implementations of Unix’s userland utitilities for MSDOS and Windows, most recently CygWin, and my website was running on VPSes, first under OpenBSD and soon after always under FreeBSD.

Quest

The first Linux I tried was Linux Mint 18 Sylvia. I immediately liked it. Where Windows 8 and 10 offered me lots of things I will never need, and hid what I do need ever deeper within the system, like a command line, a text editor and a browser, Linux Mint has a start button in the lower left corner of the screen, and the menu it invokes is full of preinstalled useful programs.

@? Not finished yet. @?

Fluxbox

@? Not finished yet. @?