@lesdelc :-
Welcome to Linux.org.
I WOULD say "Welcome to the ranks of the enlightened", but.....it sounds as though you've been heading in this direction for a long while. So instead, I will just say "Congrats"!
Me, I stayed with XP for its entire lifespan. At EOL, that was enough; I'd had almost 13 years of M$'s shenanigans; they weren't getting any more of my hard-earnt cash. I Googled "Free operating systems", and was blown away by what came up.....
Literally overnight, I wiped Windows out of my life and installed Ubuntu in its place. The usual "learning-curve" then ensued, along with a fair bit of distro-hopping (as expected). Six months down the line, Canonical decided - in their wisdom! - to drop support for the elderly ATI graphics chip I had at that time. And of course, their customised kernels behaved the same in ALL the 'flavours' and associated spins...
I looked around, further afield. I found 'Puppy' Linux, and. almost straight-away fell in love with its quirky philosophy & way of doing things. The desktop rig and lappie I had at the time were both ancient, and Puppy's mission has always been to keep ancient hardware still alive, and viable. Puppy always uses bog-standard kernels, as they come from kernel.org, so.....everything functioned as it should. Sweet!
(On top of all that, Puppy was the first distro to work OOTB with the weird graphics chip in the P4-powered Dell lappie. No messing around with arcane kernel-line parameters any more to get the display behaving itself!)
It worked for me. Nearly 10 years down the line, I'm still resident in the 'kennels'!
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I moderate on a couple of other forums. I only found this one last year, but liked it immediately. In addition to which, I recognised several names I knew from other fora, so it's like a "home from home" as far as I'm concerned.
They're a great bunch.....and will often bend over backwards to help folks out. So; once again....."Welcome!"
Mike.
