Keyboard Magic

So to fully bore many of you to tears, I have on occasion mentioned I normally use alternative operating systems -plural because different laptops, tablets and phones each end up happier with various iterations (distributions, aka "distros") of my fave OS.

Another good reason is the massive amount of 'nix systems that are freely downloadable, installable and useful for basic day to day writing, web work and such.

So, another point (are you asleep yet?) is that I learned computing many years ago on pre-MS/Dos systems that had zero graphics. Yup, letters and numbers and punctuation marks only. Simple. Also simple was no mouse as there was no need so it was always about keyboard entry. Even back then you could also use the function (F1, F2 and so on) keys, often programming them to do a specific task. Therefore your hands never left the keyboard.

Though I use several systems (Linux Mint, Peppermint Linux and others) I also use one daily called Bunsenlabs, also a Linux system that comes out of Germany.

These all owe a great deal to Debian Linux, one of the oldest 'nix operating systems and rock solid.

The deal with Bunsenlabs is it's simplicity, that it uses a mouse (onboard such as the one on this old Intel-based Macbook Pro laptop I'm writing on) and is so fast and easily upgrade-able it's amazing.

I'm writing this very piece using a down-and-dirty program called Nano, just a simple and quick word processor.

Later I'll cut-and-paste it into my Wix blog site with a couple pics so you can see just how easy the creators of this system made it for keyboard-centric computing.

It's not everyone's cup of tea (I'm drinking some ginger/turmeric as I type) of course, but piece of cake for using a machine that would run like a turtle using other operating systems and by now likely be in a landfill -environment check here!

So that's all the news from a sometimes luddite-sounding old dude who likes to save money and work alternative when it works for me :)

And as always, thanks for stopping by, -Glenn