@kdk, Hello Dean. Hey! I’m older than dirt and watched as dirt formed from dust! LOL!! Welcome to Linux! Right here on forums.jeff.pro is the place to be. Along with all the great channels in Telegram. I see @Ai sent a link with a possible cure. I hope it worked for you. If not, I can offer another option. That would be to try another distro. It sounds like you have mastered creating Live Bootable media. That’s the first and very important step on your way to freedom. I’ve lost track of how many distros I’ve tried but can say that I have Mint on this Dell and in VirtualBox I have 14 distros as Virtual Machines currently. Once you get going, I highly recommend giving it a try. Try one, delete it and try another. On the Dell and the HP laptop, I can run more than one machine at a time. Let me know if you’re interested. I have a guide for installing systems in VirtualBox that may provide helpful.
Happy Linuxing!!! 
Thanks for your reply, @BigDaveAZ ! I’m so sorry it’s taken 3 weeks to return. Things have been rough.
I am occasionally poking through the forums and trying to understand a little better. My latest quest has suddenly gotten to feel more pressing. I hate my new phone, the first replacement of my first smartphone. I am not a fan of them in the first place. Miss my flip. I think I am going to look to replace… so I’ve been looking at those topics.
I appreciated finding your welcome!
Retired teacher here. Just installed Mint on a 6 year old Windows machine. It has new life! 
Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m very confused when it comes to stuff like this. Hoping someone can help me degoogle my phone. Tired of big tech bs.
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
@Rachel_G_Adams welcome to the first steps to regaining your freedom from big tech. The first question is what is the make and model of your phone. Post your question under the questions board and we will help. From there we can get you instructions for de-googling your phone. Cheers!!
Hi everybody I’m so happy to be here, makes my learning into a deep Linux much better. Thank you all for your expertise, is been appreciated…
Hi everyone.
Complete novice here.
Neighbor is in a Linux club.
Gave me a computer with Ubuntu installed.
Put a password on. I was on for about 10 minutes just looking around.
I changed my password to something I thought would be easier to remember.
Now, I haven’t been able to log back in.
Please assist. I really feel stupid asking my neighbor to help me out after giving me a computer to learn Linux.
I don’t even know how to uninstall and start over, which would be good to know how.
Hi! I did the same thing once. Did you try to log in with the original password? In my case, for some reason my password did not change and I was able to log in with my old password.
I have tried the old one. No luck.
Thanks for responding. My son said he is going to show me what to do. I am hoping he can.
Hi there @KatM
I am back in my computer. Woo hoo!
I tried the old password…didn’t work.Tried my new one in a variety of ways. Apparently, I had one letter capitalized and didn’t realize it.
So now, I am chatting with some robot to see what I need to learn on the site. I have a feeling it will be a long time before I get to learn how to do Linux but it will be entertaining for awhile.
Thanks again for reaching out to a newbie.
Glad you got back on. I’m sure you’ll pick it up in no time. I’m still learning new things all the time, but definitely found the basics pretty easy to learn. Good luck and have fun!
It bites that I have to promote big tech… but there are thousands of videos on youtube for newcomers to Linux. Be careful… the rabbit hole is DEEP!
P.S. Welcome to freedom.
Greetings from Salem, Oregon USA. I’m grateful for this forum and the folks at Jeff.pro and the Telegram channels for focusing on FOSS. I’m so ready to dump big tech!
If you care to know, here is my background and my adventures switching to Linux:
I’m 61 and have seen (and been fascinated by) the entire evolution of PCs and the internet. I learned on DOS and thought that GUI was for losers who couldn’t be bothered to learn commands, LOL. And of course, like many I worked in an office environment where Windows prevailed so here I am!
Accomplishments so far:
*Transformed my 2016 ASUS laptop from Windows to Mint
*Set up VPN
*Completed the LMS courses to date
*Set up account with Digital Ocean
*Set up Proton Mail account
*installed Libre Office for Windows on my desktop and am using it exclusively—so far every Word, Excel and PowerPoint file I have opened with it has saved over to Libre Office beautifully. I’m about ready to cancel my Office 365 account and am confident that my files will be usable.
Am working on switching my desktop to Linux:
*confirmed that we can access my husbands work email (Outlook) . We access it through our browser and It works exactly the same on my Linux Mint laptop using the Brave browser as it did with Windows and MicroSoft Edge.
*researched replacements for the Windows apps/programs I currently use, including:
Trello
Paprika recipe manager
Roots Magic genealogy software
Canva desktop
Cricut Design Space
Several of these have web versions I can use but I did choose to switch from Trello to ToDoist because it has a Linux versión and I can sync it with my iPhone until I can switch to a ‘Libre’ phone down the road.
The apps that don’t have a web version I plan to use with a Windows VM.
My next steps:
*Install Linux on my desktop
*set up VPS to host my websites (currently on Wix)
*set up virtual cloud for files and email
When that’s all done and I’ve completely dumped gmail, Dropbox and Wix I want to get more hardware for my very own server. Easy peasy!
Thanks for reading this.
