I had crossed paths with Linux before. It had appealed to me on several levels. One of them was simplicity. The other was the potential of understanding deeply the tools that I would be using. At one point I dabbled with OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and a few other distros that had been personally recommended to me. But for years I had put off learning it because I had many good reasons to: work, personal projects, so many other applications or tools to learn.
Some years ago I retired my old MSI GX620 laptop running Windows XP. It was a great performer — still think it is — being a gaming laptop and the fact it was running the venerable XP. When I recently needed to install Linux (Ubuntu) to view an OpenFOAM source, I felt the keen desire to dive back into it again.
I tentatively chose to run with Lubuntu simply because of the LXDE; I wanted to make most of my older hardware. With nothing concrete to do in Linux, I went on a installation journey to find all the possible apps that may be of some use to me: GIMP, Blender, FocusWriter, XnViewMP. Installing packages seemed easier with these package managers. I had been clueless the last time I used Linux and was never really aware of them. It almost felt like I was being cheated from a true Linux experience. I did experience a missing library error installing XnView, which prompted me to read about how to properly fish for them. FocusWriter used a PPA that I had to learn how to install as well.
So far it’s been fun learning simple stuff. But I still don’t know what to do with it. I want it to play a bigger part on what I do and if I don’t find something worthwhile, I may never learn it deep enough.