A win for Lubuntu

 As I've written elsewhere, we've been without the internet and all the conveniences of modern life it brings for a few days.

Very much a first world problem but extremely aggravating none the less.

And, because of our connectivity problems, I've been using the town library's free wifi to check my email etc.

The first time I did so, I used the HP windows laptop I bought second hand as a travel computer earlier this year.

This turned out to be a mistake, because it of course, after being powered off since our trip out west to Lake Tyrell, and being windows it of course wanted to download squillions of updates, sync onedrive, and the rest. Normally I power it up once a month to sync itself, and before we go on a trip turn off Windows update and the rest. As luck would have it that was something I was going to do the afternoon our router died.

So, let's just say the windows laptop wasn't a good choice of device, especially as the library's wifi isn't the fastest.

The other time I used the library's wifi, I used my Lubuntu machine. (I could have used the distraction free machine, or my old Ideapad 1, but I'd shafted myself as the distraction free machine is barebones and doesn't have an email client installed, and my Ideapad had software to connect to Google drive and sync installed. What I needed was a machine that had all the tools but no dependencies, and the Lubuntu machine fitted the bill.)

So, up to the library.

Our town library has two public wifi networks - one called 'Public' which is 2.4GHz and a 5GHz service called 'Public-5g', which is less used, in part because some people confuse it with a 5G phone service.

So, power up, connect to the 5g service, open Thunderbird, and it flew - which is pretty good for what after all is a nine year old laptop.

The lack of dependencies on external services, as well as a lightweight but efficient operating system meant that it simply did its job, and did it well.

And what it shows is that (a) Linux really does help you get the best out of old hardware, and (b) all the syncing and background download slows windows down, especially as Microsoft increasingly position it as both a cloud centric and cloud dependent environment ...