I’m (well, I like to think I’m) a very stable person, and it freaked me right out.

Anyone remember the early Windows 10 update that booted back up with a black screen that said “Don’t Panic”?

That was the most panic inducing moment I’ve ever had with any PC.

Yes! I slapped Lubuntu on an HP Stream 13 not long ago. Works like a charm.

I bounced around a few different distros about twenty years ago. OpenSuse, Mint, and Ubuntu. I settled on Ubuntu (6.0X I think) because the others had a lot of trouble with hardware in my Korean laptop at the time. Ubuntu was the only one that had the track pad working right away, and also the only one I managed to get Korean keyboard input working in. I never did get the webcam working in any of them. I used Ubuntu in some form or another up until a few months ago when I switched to Mint. Largely because of Lemmy.

The year Titanic came out, I finally decided to see what the fuss was about in it’s 18th week playing (a new record!) in our local theater. I took my seat, and there were a couple of teenage girls a few seats over from mine. They started sobbing during the opening credits. I’m fairly certain they’d seen the movie already. Probably more than once.

That sounds like a lot of trouble and potential trouble for people who use the printer who don’t have the trouble I do. I can live with the failure rate. It happens quickly, and I can just print again. If Mint fixes it, that’s great!

It was weird. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS printed perfectly. First try, every time. Barring printer issues not related to the OS anyway. Then, 20.04 dropped, and I couldn’t print anything. For two years, I had to move files to the Mac on the front desk to print at work because it refused to print anything. Same printer. I tried a few fixes people had posted, but none worked for me, and most fixes were for HP printers and mine is an Epson, which no one reported any problems with.

Now, with 22.04, I get intermittent printing. It works more often than not, but I’d estimate my print jobs get randomly canceled about 30% of the time. Which is annoying, but not deal-breaking since I usually just push it through again, and it works. To be fair, it might be because of wireless printing, but I doubt it since like I said, 18.04 worked flawlessly with the exact same setup. I might just try out Mint sometime and see if it makes a difference.

All the talk of Mint lately. Looks like my fifteen-year Ubuntu streak may be coming to an end. Will I, decidedly not a power-user just an Internet browser, occasional game player, Csound programmer, Libreoffice user notice a difference? Is Mint better at printing? That’s the only real problem I’ve had with Ubuntu over the years.

Maybe I used it wrong, but I joined for a few months, and just used it to search up artists I already knew and listen. And then, I found it less convenient than my MP3 collection which easily fits on an SD card or my phone’s drive. I only very periodically search for new music. And I usually end up obsessing over one artist for a long time before moving onto another. We’re talking months to years. I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Rush for a few months now. I was never a fan growing up, but decided to give their whole discography a fair shot. Now, I can’t stop listening to Rush.

I just keep downloading albums of MP3s like I have since the late 90s. It used to take hours and half the songs were mislabeled and real sketchy quality. Now, it takes seconds to download an entire album, and they’re almost always correctly labeled and high quality. I tried Spotify for a while, but it really seemed like it was for attention span deprived people who want something different every song. Gimme full albums any day.