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The journey begins in approximately 2004. Windows denied all knowledge of my C: drive. Happily, all my data was on a separate partition and a re-installation of Windows fixed the immediate problem. However, I was worried that I had no real backup strategy. I didn't really have a good destination for full backups, so I just copied important files to another computer that had limited free space. My solution was to buy a really cheap computer from eBay and to use that as my backup medium. I bought a machine without an operating system but I thought I could put Linux on it, which might be fun. At that point, my Linux experience was limited to experimenting with Knoppix from a magazine CD. I started with a Mandrake disk and went through the installation. A breeze! A quick reboot… and a blank screen. I had no idea what the problem was. But why did the installer work but then give me a blank screen? I was not impressed. I didn't want to spend time fixing the problem, I just wanted a working computer.
Mon voyage démarre aux alentours de 2004.Windows ne reconnaissait plus mon C:. Heureusement, toute mes données étaient sur une autre partition et une ré-installation de Windows a résolu le problème immédiat.
Cependant, le fait de ne pas avoir de véritable stratégie de sauvegarde m'inquiétait. Je n'avais pas vraiment un bon emplacement pour des sauvegardes complets ; aussi, je copiais tout simplement mes fichiers importants vers un autre ordinateur qui avait un peu d'espace libre.
Ma solution était d'acheter un ordinateur sur eBay qui était vraiment bon marché et l'utiliser pour mes sauvegardes. La machine n'avait pas de système d'exploitation, mais je pensais pouvoir y mettre Linux, ce qui pourrait être amusant. À ce stade-là, mon expérience avec Linux se limitait à des expériences faites avec Knoppix à partir d'un CD de magazine.
J'ai commencé avec un disque de Mandrake et ai fait l'installation qui était rapide et facile. J'ai redémarré la machine sans attendre… et un écran vide s'affichait. Je n'avais aucune idée du problème. Pourquoi l'installeur a-t-il fonctionné en me laissant avec un écran vide ? Je n'étais guère impressionné. Il était hors de question de passer du temps à solutionner le problème ; je voulais tout simplement un ordinateur qui fonctionnait.
I decided to install Knoppix. That worked perfectly, but then I discovered that Knoppix was pretty much impossible to update. It really was meant to be a CD distro. So, yet another installation, this time Fedora Core. Very nice. I really liked Fedora Core. But after a year or so, I realised that I was using the backup computer more than my main computer. This made little sense. Obviously something had to change. Happily, I came across Ubuntu on the front of Linux Format magazine. Possibly it was 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). It worked straight away. Ubuntu and beyond I stayed with Ubuntu for some years. It was always good, except that I had to fix broken sound every time I upgraded. I tried lots of different desktops; I had about nine of them listed on my login screen. They did interfere with each other though.
J'ai décidé d'installer Knoppix. Tout a bien fonctionné, mais après j'ai découvert que Knoppix était presque impossible à mettre à jour. C'était bel et bien une distrib. sur CD.
Ce qui m'a amené à faire encore une autre installation, cette fois-ci de Fedora Core. C'était très bien. Fedora Core me plaisait beaucoup. Mais après environ un an, je me suis rendu compte que j'utilisais l'ordinateur de sauvegarde plus que ma machine principale. Ce n'était pas logique. Il était évident qu'il fallait changer quelques chose.
One disappointing feature of Linux was that I found it difficult to program shortcut keys. I'm much more of a keyboard person than a mouse person, possibly because I used OpenVMS from Digital Equipment on a real terminal for many years.
In Windows, I was an avid user of AutoIt and then Autohotkey. Both of these programs made it really easy to define keys to control the desktop environment, move or resize windows, flip between applications, control Microsoft Outlook, process clipboard entries… the list was endless.
Linux seemed to have no equivalent way of defining keys and it was disappointing that I could be more productive in Windows than in Linux. Eventually, I found Autokey, which is a reasonable alternative, but is more cumbersome to use than Autohotkey.
For a long time, my preferred desktop was KDE 3.5. When they started work on KDE 4.0 I hated it, but persevered with the early versions for a year until it finally shipped. I still hated it and was angry that I had wasted a year on software that I was obviously not going to like and had just too many bugs in the beta releases. I didn't look at KDE again until a couple of months ago.
I moved to a Gnome 2 desktop until the Unity desktop came out. Unity absolutely was not for me and somehow I made the transition to Linux Mint.
Tiled windows
Not long after I moved to Mint, I decided to try a tiling window manager. I was rather dubious about the experiment — I really couldn't imagine that I would like having windows controlled by the computer. I installed xmonad and loved it. Well, mostly, but after the first flush of enthusiasm, I found xmonad to be difficult to customise. The configuration files required Haskell and I did not get on well with Haskell.
After a couple of years, I settled on the i3 tiling window manager and several years later I'm still using it.
Since I started with tiling window managers, I have not really cared too much about which distro I use, or the latest and greatest features. Because I don't have a desktop I don't bother with wallpaper or colours.
The status quo
My environment is configured so that it is biased towards keyboard use rather than mouse use. The main features are: • Fish for the shell. • Synapse as the main program launcher. • Emacs as the editor. • Pale Moon as my main browser, with the Pentadactyl addon so that I can control it from the keyboard. • Chromium (with cVim) and Firefox ESR (with Vimperator) as secondary browsers. • Autokey for expansion of abbreviations and some control of applications.