It's an ongoing joke for a reason, I suppose. For as long as I can remember, the biggest Linux fans have been waiting for the operating system to take its rightful place on home computers across the land. Some have even been waiting for almost 30 years!
Charlotte's Linux Adventures
Never really on the cutting edge, I first heard about Linux in the mid-1990s and became quite interested. I think I good part of it was a desire to tinker with something computery, being really inspired by the very queer-coded Hackers (1995), and part of it was just getting a bit bored of Windows. I briefly worked at Staples during high school and purchased a boxed copy of Slackware 3.2 to give it a try. I found it really challenging to install, but that didn't really matter: there was something I liked and kept returning to.
For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop was 2024: only 17 years after I first managed to get Slackware installed.
My biggest reason was actually hardware and less-so software. I had been using a Mac since 2014 and generally pretty happy with the way macOS works.
My main hobby is making film photos and, as the owner of a base-model M1 Mac Mini, I didn't have any way to increase internal storage or memory. Although I understood that when I purchased it, my needs began to change somewhat and it didn't really sit right with me. I didn't want to have external disks all over the place on my desk or be stuck with only 8GB memory - no matter how fast it was.
Another contributing factor was their being a mahoosive company that was possibly going to face some very uncertain politics. In short, I didn't trust that when faced with a motivated government of the stripe the US eventually chose, that they would stick by their stated principles of privacy.
So far, nothing that I was afraid of has come to pass, but I am still wary. It feels a little more "when" than "if" to me.
So with that, at the end of Summer 2024, I swapped the M1 Mini for an off-lease Dell corporate tower from a local shop. There is nothing elegant about it whatsoever, but for what I do with it, I haven't noticed any speed difference (though the M1 is much faster than the i5-8500).
What I did get was what I was looking for: the ability to install more storage and increase memory! While I haven't increased the storage yet (that's to come!) I did increase the memory from 16GB to 32GB, which made things nicer.
There was, of course, no way that I was going to run Windows 11 (which I use daily for work), so with a growing interest in Linux (inspired in part by watching Veronica Explains videos on YouTube), I decided that I would use Debian 12 as my operating system.
It's definitely not a choice that I regret, and more than a year later, I have a rather nice-to-me Debian 13 install that does nearly everything I want it to do and more!
What's the one thing it doesn't do? My Plustek 8200i scanner only has drivers for macOS and Windows. Since I already own copies of SilverFast 9, purchasing the more expensive VueScan licence is something I have admittedly balked at. To get around this, I run SilverFast in a Windows 11 VM.
December 22, 2025