It has been a long time but I have finally gotten the time to come back to this fine forum.
Excited about upgrading to 6 when that happens and finding a spot to install the cauldron for the building of 7.
Am located in S.E. Montana, USA.
Yes I am primarly an agricultural worker.
Also a Blacksmith primarily interested in hardware and tools.
Photography is a hobby that I don't spend enough time on but does make me a big fan of the fine tools available to Gnu/Linux for image manipulation. I got started in photography when it was all film. People that think you can take a photo with a digital camera and get the image you "see" in your mind when you hit the shutter release are wrong. Image processing is at least as important in digital photography as it was (is) with film. This is true with Dslr cameras and all others. The on board processors are, in my opinion, actualy more limited than with film.
With film you could, for good cameras, get a number of different types of film for specific conditions kind of similar to the point and shoot digital camers dial that allows you to choose a condition. There were, for cameras above the entry level, more selections available with film than with those dials. Even then if you ran the film through a commercial film developer and then took the negatives home and ran them through your home darkroom you got much better results.
For most processes needed to improve an image digital tools are vastly faster to use. The one exception is dealing with over or under exposed areas that are easy to get if in images taken in conditions of great light/dark contrast. Easy to see how if you think about areas of shadow and light in an area with dense Pine growth with snow on the ground. Where the shadow ends it is easy to get spots of problems with exposure being over or under what it should be.
Exposure itself is a darkroom term. That is where it is actually easiest to deal with although not fast.
Anyway I like Mageia a good bit even if my usual OS is Debian testing or sid. Mageia is the distro I recommend to noobs particularly. The way administrative chores are handled in a gui is the best in any OS at least I think so. I think this was important when Mandrake first came out but even more so now.
These "tech savvy young people" are app savvy, not tech savvy. That is not to put them down in the least it is just the way people are introduced to things computer related. I, as an example of someone that is no longer young, cut my computer teeth on MSdos in my meer 40s. There for the cli in Gnu/Linux is actually a joy for me to use. It actually is tremendous fun for me because is so much better than that old Word Processor OS ever could be.
But to think that people without that exposure should have the cli inflicted on them and they should think it wonderful is asking a lot of human nature that is pretty unreasonable.
I have a new Mageia user in this little (population 500) town that likes it quite well and thinking seriously of transitioning away from using Win completely. A good part of that is due to the ease of maintaining Mageia compared to Windows.
Most people I know that run Gnu/Linux either dual booted to start with or still do. I never did. As I said, I am a Blacksmith. We are not noted for being technophobes. We invented technology, at least in our humble and modest way of thinking. Windows finally pissed me off for the last time in 08. Took us a month the get a Gnu/Linux distro running (internal dial up modem in wrong slot). We, when that was straightened out finally, have not used Windows and banished Win running hardware from our house (my wife is a Smith [Silver on Black] too) as we as Smiths also tend to hold a grudge.
I will help people with Win problems. They will have to put up with some lectures. And make some attempt to secure that crapware. Data recovery jobs are a particularly fun thing for me. It is fun to do on Win machines. The users are so shocked at the relative ease of doing that sort of thing with the tools in Gnu/Linux. And when the nearest computer related business is 80 miles away they generally do come to me.
Now several run Win in VM with no access to the web for better security. All files in the shared directory run through clamav before the VM is opened. All files then run with some Win AV product of their choice downloaded by the Host and installed then on Win in the VM before anything is opened. Updating the Win AV is a pain but can be done.
I also highly recommend;
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt instead of any sort of adblocker. There are directions on the site for installation on Win or Mac. For anything based on Linux simply add to the;
/etc/hosts file
That list has priority over the dns server and redefines the addresses to 0.0.0.0 a nul address. Existing cookies can't call home that way.
List is updated at about a 6 week schedule. Current is from 5-15-16. You can sign up for an email announcement when it updates. I just check that txt version because I don't like wading through the site and already get too much email. The one before that was 4-1-16.
Last time I was here I was widget. Can't get to that account. Couldn't contact anyone about it sucessfully so just created a new account.
Very glad to be back.
SelfBox1 8G ram, ADM FX-6300 6core 3.5GHz, Radeon HD 6450, Audigy2 5.1, 3x500G HDD 1x320G HDD, 500G External, Debian Stable, Debian Testing, Debian Sid and Mageia5 on the 2 internal drives.
Several external drives with various distros installed.