For 35 years, Stuart worked as a System programmer for a small company where his projects included database servers, device drivers, protocol stacks, expert systems, accounting systems, aged AR/AP reports, and EDI. Currently, he is doing hourly consulting work for small businesses.

Stuart’s childhood heroes were his Dad and George Müller. His favorite movies are “The Gods must be crazy” and “The mission”. He grew up in a pacifist denomination, so feels “The mission” movie is very relevant to him. He loves over roasted vegetables.

Composing and performing music, Mesh networking, and refurbishing discarded computers to run Fedora Linux are some of his spare time interests as well as history, especially ancient Western and 19th century English/American.

“Love/charity, Hope, Faith, Virtue, and knowledge” are the five qualities someone should possess, according to Stuart.

Also: Fedora Community Blog: Contribute at Fedora Linux 35 GNOME 41 Test Day

• Zorin OS 16 Pro arrives complete with optional 'Windows 11' desktop

  Zorin Pro 16 will be released next week, along with a free Lite edition, complete with an optional "Windows 11" desktop theme.

  Zorin OS is one of a few commercial Linux distributions which aim to be user-friendly alternatives to Windows and Mac. The OS is open source and pricing is based on a freemium model, with free Core, Lite and Education editions, and a paid for Pro edition (formerly called Ultimate).

  The Pro edition adds "premium desktop layouts," based on macOS, Gnome and Ubuntu, whereas the other editions are Windows-like. The Pro edition also includes additional business and media applications, games, and perhaps more significantly, Zorin installation support.

  Aware that users can install what they like even on the free editions, Zorin has a "why pay" article that pitches the payment as a means of supporting the project. The new Pro edition will cost the same as Ultimate, £39 plus VAT, and will be available from 17 August.

• Zorin OS 16 Pro brings Microsoft's Windows 11 interface to Linux

  Windows 11 looks quite beautiful, but let's be honest... it is pretty much just Windows 10 with a fresh coat of paint. Sadly, Microsoft is requiring some pretty strict hardware requirements for the upcoming operating system, meaning many people could find themselves unable to upgrade. Even worse, the company has provided confusing communications regarding TPM requirements.

  Thankfully, even if Microsoft thinks your perfectly fine computer is obsolete, the Linux community doesn't think that. In other words, if your computer is incompatible with Windows 11 due to a lack of a TPM chip or other hardware issue, it can still run a modern Linux distro just fine. In fact, thanks to the upcoming Zorin OS 16 Pro, you can experience the all-new Windows 11 interface on Linux! Wow!

The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way of interacting with your computer. To harness all the power of Linux, it’s highly recommended mastering the interface. It’s true the CLI is often perceived as a barrier for users migrating to Linux, particularly if they’re grown up using GUI software exclusively. While Linux rarely forces anyone to use the CLI, some tasks are better suited to this method of interaction, offering inducements like superior scripting opportunities, remote access, and being far more frugal with a computer’s resources.

The part of the operating system responsible for managing files and directories is called the file system. It organizes our data into files, which hold information, and directories (also called ‘folders’), which hold files or other directories. We cover the basics of the file system in Linux for Starters – Part 12.

lfs is billed as a better df, a standard Unix command used to display the amount of available disk space for file systems on which the invoking user has appropriate read access.

I am a son and grandson of American missionaries who moved to Brazil in 1952. Since my mother was born here (my father was a seven month old baby), I was born automatically a Brazilian citizen – even though I was born in the USA. Being brought up in Brazil, I learned both American English in the home, and learned Brazilian Portuguese in parallel. I am fluent in both languages. Computers came into my life as my dad saw the importance and value of them in the eighties. Watching him hack an Apple IIe and a daisy wheel printer to get the tilde accent over the letter “y” was an adventure in and of itself.

Since I was homeschooled, the value and importance of open source software became very clear to me as soon as I heard about it around 1999. As soon as I heard of Linux, I got hooked. Then, I heard of StarOffice which later became OpenOffice, which forked into LibreOffice and saw the birth of The Document Foundation.

I have been on a learning journey for most of my life. Everything I have learned is self-taught, including LibreOffice. My main activity in life is teaching in general. Teaching software to newbies such as the elderly, the underprivileged and young people is a passion I have. LibreOffice is an excellent starting point as it has virtually all the basic areas: text, images, markup languages, programming logic on a very simple scale with macros, databases etc., and much, much, more.