Well I haven’t done too much technical since retiring but the last three days are a minor exception. If you don’t care about computers and operating systems you can skip this. I had become increasingly frustrated with Windows 10 on my laptop. The laptop was taking way too long to boot, was very slow to start applications and would frequently just hang for a quite some time. Over the past couple of weeks I helped it a lot by disabling virus protection and the Malware detection but that didn’t seem like a great long term solution. I decided about a week ago to dry run Linux (again). I installed the ISO to a flash drive. This enabled me to try it out without yet committing to it. The distribution is Linux Mint and it is currently the most popular. Mint mounted my windows drive with no problem so I could do some work, browse the web, but not keep any OS changes (no persistence). I really like it and three days ago I decided to take the plunge and install it for real. First I backed up all of my data to external drives. My main backup is on a drive protected by Bitlocker. I then did the full clean install of Linux Mint (not dual boot). It claimed to complete OK but totally failed on reboot. Of course this happened at Lake Lopez, the only place during our travels where I have absolutely NO Internet connectivity. So I lived in a Starbucks for two days where I finally realized my flash drive image had some kind of errors. Aarg. I used the bootable flash to re-download the ISO to yet a different flash drive and voila, I now have a fully functional Mint. I can mount my Bitlocker drive though it is a bit of a pain (two special console mount commands). The Bitlocker drive does get lost after a while but has always come back after a remount. I spent today totally updating, copying data, and installing apps. Linux has come a long way and so far the experience is quite good. Libre-Office so far has been totally compatible with my MS Office files, though I knew up front that my Excel macros would not work in Libre. Let me know if anyone wants any details.