A bouquet for the maintainers of Trisquel

I know the Trisquel maintainers don't necessarily read the forum, so please make sure they see this.

I've been using Trisquel as my daily driver for more than a decade. Ever since the scAmazon Lens debacle made staying with Ubuntu untenable.

For at least 10 years of that time, I was using the same little Acer Aspire One netbook for everything. Other than a secondary laptop I ran LMDE on for a while, which I passed on when I went to China, I hadn't done any distro-hopping for years. Then a couple of years ago I got a new secondary laptop working, one small enough to take travelling. But I couldn't get WiFi working under Trisquel. So I started using LMDE on that too.

But just recently, I upgraded to the new version of LMDE, and started getting stuck in a login loop. A fresh reinstall didn't fix it, and I ran into the same problem with fresh installs of a bunch of Debian-based distros. Not vanilla Debian itself, which booted into a confusing neo-GNOME not-desktop just fine. But the official Mate versions, of Debian and a bunch of other distros, login loops, login loops... login loops.

So I thought, time to try something from the Red Hat branch of the family again, and installed the Mate version of Fedora. This at least works for basic admin computing.

But trying to use it for entertainment has been painful. So much that I've ended up running a Trisquel live session off a live USB stick as a media player OS, instead of using Fedora. If I could figure out what I've done with my ThinkPenguin USB WiFi dongle, Fedora would get the boot, and I don't mean when I turn my on computer :P Same if I found another way to get WiFi working under Trisquel with the hardware I have to hand (even *gasp* install the nonfree driver?!).

Normally I could still use Trisquel. At home on another laptop I have that's larger, or anywhere using the one I brought back from China, which is smaller and more portable (although the keyboard is... weird). But I owe so much technical debt to my hardware at the moment, none of my salvaged devices is in a usable state.

This series of minor catastrophes has really made me value the easy run I've had on Trisquel over the years. It's a really well-maintained distro, that's always created fantastic experiences for me as a daily desktop GNU/Linux. I really value the work of everyone who contributes to making it what is is. Thanks for your contributions!