It has to have been somewhere closer to fifteen years, giving my kids age, I was sitting at my porch, swearing and wishing this "Linux-thing" all the... actually everything I could come up with. Why couldn't it be as "intuitive" as 98SE? Man, was I clueless. But it sure was an uphill struggle. There was a time when I actually considered "installing Debian" as my hobby. Seriously, about two or three times a week, for months, just to get the basics absolutely right. Sigh...

I had a p133 laptop and used the floppy-install. Over and over. Nuff said. The thing is, it worked... eventually.

I still have the old laptop around somewhere, not powered up for years though, but I reckon it could... never mind it could work as reliable and safe as a Win-box, that's not relevant... just knowing it could boot up and give me access to those files from the last century is enough.

The reason I started writing this was, I saw the article while I was about to update my system and a lot of stuff popped up. From all those updates that just generally broke stuff to my special dread... the NVIDIA-updates. It is possible that it was just a couple of months in the late nineties, or possibly a little later, but it still sends shivers down my spine. Having installed Debian on the desktop computer, yeah, my wife and kids only way of getting on line, with all my speeches about how much better, secure and all around... right... Linux and GNU was, Just out of Windows, it was really though being sent out to a shell with no GUI whatsoever. None. I really appreciated the guy in Scotland trying to make the driver work, although, had anyone asked me when another update just had screwed up "everything", I would probably not expressed it that way in the moment, though. :-) Now, some ten-, fifteen years later, even a kernel update is just... nothing major. Just click and confirm, without the nagging feeling that something might break.

I'm using a derivative, Lubuntu, on my netbook right now, but as always, since before the millennium, keeping Debian on my server .

Thanks for a throughly solid distro.

I really mean it.

Thanks.

(Second language, spell check by Abi-word.)