One old laptop.
Check.
A blank USB pen drive.
Check.
Burn a disc image of Linux Mint using Etcher to the USB pen.
Done.
Insert pen into old laptop, reboot.
Done.
Different yet familiar GUI appears – Mint OS appears to be in working order. Wi-fi works, blue-tooth works, speakers work.
So far so good.
Hit install with zero hesitation. It’s only an old laptop, what could go wrong?
Done.
With Linux fully installed you install all the Open Source equivalents to expensive proprietary software you allegedly can’t live without such as Adobe, Microsoft Office and all the rest. Remember how long it used to take to load Photoshop on your windows machine?
Kaboom.
A few days pass, you don’t even remember the old Windows based experience. Timid experiments with the terminal begin, and in mere hours you know all about sudo, ls, grep, chmod, apt and dozens of other apparently arcane shell commands.
And then…
A week passes and now you have another ancient laptop from 2009 (which you found abandoned in a garage) as a home server for streaming media and storing files.
Easy.
Now you’re level 27 on the Bandit hacker wargame and you can’t even imagine life without the Bash shell.
I wonder if this is a common experience in transitioning from to Linux from all that other madness.