Guest Post: Responsible Ownership

Guest Post by “Artim:”

When I got my first car, I wasn’t allowed to drive it until I could demonstrate how to check the oil, coolant, belts, hoses, lights, signals, tires and stuff. A lot of people chipped in and got this special set of elevated pedals for it since I’m very small:

In fact I still get pulled over when I’m not in my own home town, by police responding to reports of “a small child driving a car.” The officers usually just laugh along with me after running my license, and pass the word along to other cops, LOL. The point being that a lot of good people have gone to a lots of trouble to make it possible and easy for me to operate a car, but I am still responsible to know how to maintain it as well as operating it.

Computers are the same way! A lot of good people have done a lot of work to make it possible for li’l ol’ me to use LINUX (Linux Lite, Linux Mint, etc) instead of Windows. But just like my car, I need to be responsible with it. Like any major appliance, a computer needs maintenance and you can’t just “drive” it without updates, cleanup, etc. That’s not just blowing the dust out of the box and keyboard, either. But the operating system needs to be kept up as well, with regular maintenance.

Linux has lots of advantages over Windows! It’s practically virus proof (unless you treat it like Windows, downloading stuff from web sites and installing it), it works on modest hardware or even really old 32-bit computers people used before I was even a twinkle in my daddy’s eyes. It’s amazing how awesome Linux is. It costs nothing, there’s all kindsa software for it for school, web, social media stuff, music and video editing, and even games. All at no cost (but donations are suggested for your favorite stuff).

But like me with my car, learn how to maintain it! And thanks to Linux Lite especially, much more than Linux Mint in my opinion, learning and maintaining your computer with the Linux Lite operating system is the easiest, simplest, and fastest way for new Linux users to do that. The welcome screen gives you all the steps, in order, and with point-and-click simplicity. You can even bring back the Welcome screen any time, even after you’ve been running Linux Lite for a long time. It does the updates, the cleanup, and tune-up stuff so you hardly even have to think about it!

With support for Windows7 ending in a few days, now is the perfect time to try it out. And you don’t even have to install it to try it out, just test-drive it on a USB thumbdrive without making any changes to your computer at all! Then if you like it, click to install. Just be sure you have backups for all your important stuff, like bookmarks, passwords, school papers, pictures, music, and stuff. Oh, and backing up stuff in Linux is super easy too by the way.

Since so many good people did so much hard work to make it possible for a tiny boy like me to drive a car, I drive it carefully and keep up on the maintenance. In the same way, since so many people have worked so hard to make it simple and easy for a kid with no technical expertise to use the amazing Linux Lite operating system, be sure to maintain it, just like my car, and donate if you can to the people who give us so much.

Get Linux Lite here!

Thank you!