During working hours or in an office call my family looks at me a bit differently. Especially when I always look at linux terminals, my wife keeps on bugging me as a weird guy! For the past two year I actually tried to explain in different ways but still she keeps on asking the same question.
What is this black screen that you are staring at?
Almost two years back (2019) the coronavirus COVID-19 affected all aspects of society and all dimensions of sustainable development. It actually created a paradigm shift in our work life as well where we had to work from home. But we were not used to it and faced multiple problems. But In fact there is a saying
Difficult Times Can Bring Out the Greatest Innovations
Due to the sudden lockdowns my wife had to work from home and she has been working at the office all these years and she is only familiar with Windows PCs. Since her work is into personal financial data, the company requested to install Citrix System in her personal machine to work in a cloud environment.
But unfortunately we didn’t have a high-end Windows 10 laptop to support the Citrix version. We have an old machine and it works well with the Windows 7 operating system. Now, unfortunately I got all the tech related complaints. I tried so many different versions of the Citrix but it was not compatible with the Windows 7 machine and the machine was not performing well and needed a fresh install as well. But my current laptop specs do not support Windows 10/11 😢…
So I took this chance to experiment and create an environment to introduce a linux based system to my wife 😀. First I installed elementary OS. Because I thought it will be good for beginners and she can learn quickly. But I faced so much trouble to find relevant drivers to support audio and wifi.
After almost 4-5 hours I gave up and installed Ubuntu and with the help of the open source community I managed to install all relevant drivers to support our old laptop. But now another problem, basically citrix application does not support linux base system.
😓
When one door closes, another door opens
My experiment box is always a Virtual Machine (VM). So I installed a VM inside my Ubuntu machine and installed Windows 11 and it worked without any issues 🎇. Finally managed to set up Citrix successfully in Windows 11.
This is a great chance that I had to show the power of open source technology and she is kind of getting familiar with Ubuntu and started to like it alot 😃
Yes! she’s a keeper!
Key learnings: we shouldn’t not force the OS on anyone. People should find out for themselves if it suits their needs.