Paolo RedaelliToday, Linux surprised me, and in itself, that’s surprising. I’ve been using it since 1998, and switched to Linux as my primary OS around 2005, so I’m pretty familiar with its capabilities. Today though, I was working on my main desktop PC, an aging “woodsman’s axe” box running an AMD FX6200 6 core, 12GB Ram, Geforce GT720 graphics card, and crucially, an Intel 128GB SSD. It was built from spare or recycled parts, and was getting a bit cranky in its old age, so I ran it with the side of the case open. To cut a long story short, I tangled myself in a lead, knocked it over, and tipped part of a glass of water into it. I tried drying it out, but it wouldn’t even post, so definitely dead. At this stage, I started getting worried. I needed to send the work tonight, and while I’d saved it before killing the box, I didn’t have another desktop computer to put the SSD into to salvage it. I did have a couple of ex-corporate laptops though, and I’d been testing Sparky Linux on an old Latitude D630, so I knew it worked (mostly) well with Linux. Without expecting much, I took the SSD, put it into the laptop, and pressed the on button. After post, the screen went blank for quite a while, and I was about to give up, then the familiar Mint boot logo appeared, followed shortly after by my desktop. I plugged it into the USB wifi stick I’d been using on the desktop, opened the Driver Manager, checked the Broadcom internal wifi, rebooted and was back in business less than 10 minutes after I’d installed the SSD. Everything worked. I plugged in my external monitor, and finished the job. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Hardware detection has been extremely good for a long time, but this was just SO painless, it did shake me up a little. But in a very happy way. Thanks Linux! TLDR: I took an SSD out of a desktop, moved it into a laptop with completely different hardware and a lot less RAM. Everything worked, job got done.