July - Personal Linux Month

July 2016 ends in a few hours, and to start off this potentially useless blog, here are the highlights for what I will label my most interesting month of 2016:

1. For all who had more than passing contact with me in July, it is obvious what qualifies for the top position - DebConf16 held at the University of Cape Town, South Africa from July 2-9. On the 7th, I also got an opportunity to give a talk at DebConf. More about this life-changing event to come later
2. After years of anti-laptop tendencies, I became a laptop owner. DebConf16 is to 'blame' for this, as the laptop was generously given me by one of the developers there. Old IBM ThinkPad X40, but Debian runs smoothly on it
3. For the first time on Linux, I tested and eventually switched to KDE on my laptop. I have mostly been a Gnome user since I started using Linux in 2011, with some testing done of LXDE, XFCE, Enlightenment/E17, etc. Verdict? Any Desktop Environment works fine for me. For my use cases, I do not particularly find big differences between Gnome and KDE, and therefore cannot be part of the corresponding 'holy war.' I simply kept KDE because I installed and it worked, and therefore had no reason to uninstall it. In passing, I was rather disappointed to find that Cinnamon is such a resource hog! KDE5 and Gnome3 run just fine on the ThinkPad X40 with 1GB RAM, while Cinnamon brought it to a grinding halt
4. I bit the bullet and switched from Debian 8/Jessie with systemd and started using Debian Testing. I have yet to see anything 'bad' - Debian really is a rock-solid distribution
5. Another obvious one: I started a blog - this blog. It will mostly document whatever I find interesting in the following subjects and more:
   
   • Debian/Linux
   • Maemo/Nokia N900
   • Mercedes Benz vehicles, particularly from the Bruno Sacco era (W124/W202)

The month of July has been special in one other respect even before 2016. On July 4, America commemorates independence, and on the very same day in 2011, I became the owner of a shiny new Nokia N900, which would play a pivotal role in my use of Linux down to this day. I am now in my 6th year with the device and still going strong.