I’ve been messing around with Linux, with varying degrees of success, for the best part of 30 years. I remember installing an early version of RedHat Linux and then wondering what to do with it. Two or three years later I got a chance to start using it in a webdev job I was doing and, since then, I’ve generally had some kind of Linux box to hand as well as periods of looking after multiple Linux servers. By the time I started at Oxford, I’d got onto Ubuntu Linux and stuck with that for quite a while although I also dallied with Debian when part of the OxCERT team.

Since moving up to Loughborough, my use of Linux began to tail off. I was still using Linux based webservers to host my code but doing less development at home. Mainly I used my MacBook as a Mac rather than to host a Linux client via VirtualBox and then, as the MacBook started to creak with age, I bought a Windows 10 PC. That had the Windows Subsystem for Linux on, which was just enough command line goodness to keep me going but, for a while, that was about it.

I’m getting back in the saddle though. I also picked up a Win11 laptop but discovered that the peril of an older, refurbished machine was that it soon got to the point where I couldn’t apply Windows security updates any more. I got Debian 12 installed on an external hard drive and that was about as far as I’d got… until I secure my new webdev job. Now I’m regularly booting up the laptop alongside using my (upgraded to) Win11 PC and, even on that, I’m making much extensive use of WSL.

One thing I’d never done much of though, until trying it last night, was using Linux for entertainment. In the past, it had always proved to be awkward to get media things running smoothly and I’d never had an incentive to push on that instead of using another OS. However, it turned out that after saying yes to a message allowing the use of some proprietary codecs, it was streaming away on a UK catch up service as well as any other device. That machine is still going to be primarily focused on my work tasks but it is nice to know that Debian – and probably many other distros – have caught up with the times on the media playback side… or maybe it is just me doing the catch up for myself!