Huge apologies to anyone who was following these posts. I tried to install the git version control software some time ago using the instructions in the user manual and it trashed a lot of the things that I already had installed, including main bits of the Debian/Linux operating system itself.
This put me off somewhat. I had a look around online for help (using the search terms and the error messages in the same way that I would when looking for help with Windows issues) but I couldn’t find anything. This may be because I need to learn how to use newsgroups, regardless – it was even more off-putting. In the end I re-installed Debian/Linux from scratch.
It led me to realise that, although you want your software to be stable, you don’t want it to be too stable because , in that scenario, there can be less information online about what to do when things go wrong! When a Windows error message appears you are almost never the first person to come across it and there are usually a few websites with information about how to potentially solve the problem.
As a result I have delayed my attempts to learn Debian/Linux (well, I’ve slowed down) and I have instead bought a second Windows laptop. I’ve since split up my ‘home’ & ‘work’ documents and software onto the two laptops. Within 48 hours I could feel the benefits of physically splitting those roles onto two computers as I have to choose which one to turn on before doing anything. I find it helps me to slow down and consider what I am doing.
I have also bought a Raspberry Pi and a refurbished iMac and I will attempt to learn how to get my Debian/Linux laptop and the iMac to do the things I listed in my previous post. I will continue to update these pages at a slower pace than I initially anticipated but with the additional benefit that I will also describe how I get an iMac to do the same things.
P.S. As I wrote this I realised that I could have done the splitting up of the ‘home’ and ‘work’ documents by creating separate users on the same computer. That would have been cheaper! Logging out (or signing off) and logging back in again as a different user would have been a good way to slow me down and help me consider what I was going to be doing.