With the end of life of XP and also my old Pentium dying I decided it was time to change to Linux permanently.

I acquired a Lenovo g500 Corei3 8GB RAM 1TB HDD for about £300 from Amazon. This came with Windows8. Played with it for a bit, thought it was a bit sluggish, tried to upgrade to 8.1 but the installation stalled. Got fed up pretty quickly, changed the UEFI to legacy OS and removed optimization for Windows and installed the 64bit version of Lubuntu from CD.

Having previously played around with various distros I chose Lubuntu as it is lite and has a simple interface.

Installed Skype and Gimp. Gimp is the equivalent of Photoshop and I use it for cropping, resizing and the occasional tweaking of my photos. Bye the way, I connect my 6D and x100s using the USB cables without any proprietary software from the makers. I like using the cable connection as it saves ware and tear on the card. The card comes up in the file manager.

Use Grsync to incrementally copy files to an external HDD, its very fast.

Lubuntu comes with Abiword as word processor which is fine, I also use MS Word on line via my outlook.com account also the OneDrive is useful.

Audacious is good for listening to mp3 files of for example Podcasts. The VLC player is great for viewing DVD’s.

Editing .mov files from the cameras can be done using QuickTime running in Wine the Windows emulation for Linux.

The browser which comes with Lubuntu is Firefox which works fine.

Finally, I can log into Second life using the 64bit version of Firestorm viewer which runs without a hitch.

So far there is nothing I can’t do in Lubuntu that I could do in Windows, so I am very happy.