If Life Gives You Lemons, Linux is the Answer

So, picture this: I teach German at a Japanese university. Which sounds fancy, but in reality, it mostly means standing in front of a bunch of polite students, projecting PDFs about the joys of the German Konjunktiv II while pretending they are actually paying attention. You know, the glamorous academic life.

(Yes, I know. The display looks outwards. It's for a dramatic effect.)

Naturally, I need a laptop for this. Not for anything complex—just showing PDFs, playing some German audio files and occasionally treating the class to videos where Germans complain about the weather. The usual.

Sure, every classroom comes equipped with a perfectly capable, slightly abused, and always suspiciously sticky laptop. But me? I like to bring my own.Why?Because cybersecurity, privacy, and good old-fashioned paranoia, that’s why. Also, Japanese university networks give me flashbacks to '90s dial-up, so no thanks.

Since I don’t need a laptop that can run NASA’s rocket simulations, I went shopping on Amazon Japan and snagged myself a used Panasonic Let’s Note CF-SV7.Specs? Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD.Price? A glorious 27,000 yen. That’s like 185 American Coffee Tokens. Honestly, I felt like I just robbed Bezos himself.

And then Windows happened...

The laptop arrived, purring softly with Windows 11 Home, complete with a friendly, random local user account (always reassuring).

Now, for the record, I’m a Linux person.My heart beats in terminal commands.My soul is a penguin. I use Linux Mint, Kali Linux and Tails as well. But… I also moonlight as an animator, and sadly, there’s that one single, irreplaceable, blood-signed software I use that refuses to cooperate with Linux. I’ve tried WINE, offering it cookies, chanting in ancient languages — nothing works. So, Windows has to sit at the table too, but only because I have no choice.

So there I was, setting up Windows like a good little corporate drone. First stop: Proton VPN (because I trust exactly nobody).Next: Dropbox, because my classes live inside a folder called "Stuff-I-Totally-Prepared-On-Time."Then: Keyboard layouts—German and Hungarian—because I am from Hungary, so I might want to type in my native language.

All good.All smooth.Until... I made the mistake.

Changing the display language. Or, as I now call it: "A descent into madness."

You see, Windows was politely set to Japanese (as expected in Japan), but since my brain operates in an organized mix of English, German, Japanese, Hungarian and sarcasm, I figured I’d set the display language to English, just like I always do. No biggie, right? I mean, it’s 2025; surely Windows has figured this out since the days of Windows 3.1.Oh, sweet summer child.

I logged out, logged back in, and… voilà? NO. Instead, I was greeted by Frankenstein’s Monster of languages. Half the menu in English, half in Japanese. The calendar mysteriously switched to Hungarian. Some random settings in what I can only assume was a dialect invented by Clippy himself.Right-click the desktop? The first three options in English, the rest in Japanese. A delightful, surreal experience. It was like my laptop had developed an identity crisis.

Sure, I tried switching to German. Tried Hungarian. Same mess. At this point, I was expecting ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to show up next.

Then Windows decided to bless me with an update screen that lasted three hours. THREE. HOURS. Staring at that soul-crushing blue screen that says "Updates are underway" while I slowly aged into a tech-support skeleton.

Eventually, I did what any seasoned Linux user would do. I force shut down that possessed laptop, booted back in, downloaded Rufus, grabbed a Linux Mint Cinnamon ISO, and never looked back.

Enter: Linux Mint. Aka, the adult in the room.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sipping my coffee while Linux Mint installed itself like the well-behaved, drama-free OS it is. Proton VPN? Installed in seconds. Dropbox? Synced like a charm. Keyboard layouts? No tears, no mystery languages, just works.

Now the laptop is running flawlessly, has been since day one. No popups, no updates that require an existential crisis, no menus in Esperanto.

Also, side note: My wife used my old Mint laptop during the pandemic for months and didn’t even notice it wasn’t Windows. If that’s not the ultimate Linux endorsement, I don’t know what is.(Linux marketing team, call me.)

The moral of the story?

If life gives you lemonade, Windows will probably spill it on your lap and freeze during the clean-up process. Linux, on the other hand, will quietly clean up the mess and ask if you need anything else. So yes, Linux truly rules. And Windows? Well, let’s just say it’s still on the naughty list.