The hosts

Nine people, four shows, one very long-running argument about which distribution is best.

Bill

mintCastLinux OTCFOSSNerds

Bill does not work in IT for a living. He has been a truck driver for over 25 years, covering all 48 states as well as Mexico and Canada, and everything he knows about Linux he taught himself. It began in the early 2000s with a machine that would no longer run a modern version of Windows, which made Linux the obvious answer.

He now admins the mintCast website and the site for his other show, 3 Fat Truckers, and runs the mintCast Nextcloud server from his own basement. He calls himself an open-source advocate and means it, always looking for the open-source alternative even when it takes some learning. Driving all day makes for perfect podcast-listening conditions, and he plans to keep talking Linux with friends every weekend for as long as he can speak.

Charlie

Linux OTCFOSSNerds

Charlie's tech journey started in the early eighties with a ZX81, the affordable alternative to the BBC Micro, and it was love at first click. He taught himself BASIC and had a go at writing a game, a clone of the puzzle where a penguin pushes ice blocks through a maze. He never finished it, but he was hooked. His first taste of Linux was a boxed set of Red Hat spotted in PC World, which he installed and then sat staring at, with no internet connection, wondering what to do next.

Professionally he has spent most of his life in international tourism, which let him live all over the world, heading home at the end of each season to tinker with his computer. In 2001 he moved from France to South Africa and opened an internet cafe with a friend, built for the fastest speeds and the strongest privacy going. It went well enough that by 2007 there were four of them. He was on Linux full time by then, but the cafe management software was not up to the job, so the cafes stayed on Windows.

Majid

mintCastLinux OTCDistrohoppers’ DigestFOSSNerds

A self-confessed nerd and geek of all things tech. Majid got into computing at seven with an Amstrad CPC 464, which grew into an obsession with the Amiga that lasted until he turned fifteen and discovered heavy metal and girls. That was also the year Commodore went bust and the Amiga story ended, and roughly when the PSOne arrived, which he missed entirely.

His career is not in IT. He is a medical doctor and anaesthesiologist specialising in orthopaedic and paediatric work, and between qualifications, shifts of 56 to 72 hours and a growing family it was 2010 before he had the headspace to come back to tech. Android phones led to Linux, then to writing for tech websites, then to podcasting and his own show, The Atypical Anaesthetist, now the Atypical Doctor Podcast. He still enjoys heavy metal, and after a few health scares he has become a real gym enthusiast.

Eric

mintCastLinux OTCDistrohoppers’ Digest

After an early stretch with an Apple IIc and a Tandy TRS-80, Eric stopped using computers until his early twenties, when he needed a career. A technical school certificate led to a job he held for eighteen years, starting as a sysadmin who inherited an ageing MS-DOS document system and learned most of it by trial and error, and ending up working across almost the whole IT organisation, from the help desk to software development as a product manager. Linux came in sideways through command-line tools that made MS-DOS easier, then proved itself on servers, and reached his desktop around 2005. Once enough software moved into the browser he switched for good, which he counts a major victory.

He has tried just about every distribution going, and distro hopping is still one of his main hobbies, along with testing open source software and running Linux servers for the websites he builds. He always wanted to fly and got close to a private pilot's licence before illness stopped him, the same illness that ended a 60-hour-week career and slowed life down. Since then he has made YouTube videos, written articles and made podcasts, and found some wonderful friends in the open source community.

Charles

mintCast

Charles is one of the voices on mintCast. He has not written a bio for the show's site yet, so rather than borrow somebody else's, this space is waiting for his.

Charles, if you are reading this, send a few lines over and they will go straight in.

Jim

mintCast

Jim's history with computers goes back to the early 1980s and a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, later an Atari 800, both well used for productivity, games and a bit of BASIC. He is a fairly recent convert, moving to Linux Mint in October 2023 after decades of nearly every version of Windows. He was already using Firefox and Thunderbird, so the change was relatively easy.

He watches and listens to a lot of Linux podcasts, takes part in a couple of online user groups, and has recently taken an interest in the BSDs since putting GhostBSD on one of his desktops. He jumped at the chance to join mintCast after one of the Roundtables, and has found it rewarding to have a group of like-minded people to talk tech with. He also publishes his own solo Linux podcast on YouTube as The Linux Shortcut.

Joe

mintCast

Joe has worked in production support for major companies for eight years. Before that he did a little of everything while finishing his degree: five years at 7-Eleven, security work, making pistons and heads for hydraulics, and four years in the military on Patriot missile systems. As his computer science degree ended he decided the best way to learn something was to be immersed in it, hopped between distributions and settled on Linux Mint.

A military brat from a military family, he was born in Alaska, started school in Germany and graduated high school in a class of 33 in small-town Iowa. He learned BASIC on his grandfather's Atari 800 and C++ through a supercomputing programme at school. He still loves to tinker and solder, does more scripting and automation than programming, and spends time with Raspberry Pis, MAME and lately tablets running Mint. He is on two other podcasts, The Linux Link Tech Show and the Linux LUGcast, and started podcasting because a move after fifteen years in one place left him missing his techie friends.

L

Leo

Linux OTC

Leo has been hooked on computers for as long as he can remember, back to counting the minutes at school until he could reach the computer room and its green monochrome screen. The family computer arrived with Windows 3.1, installed by his mother disk by disk, and Math Blaster kept him busy for hours. Through Windows 95, Encarta and dial-up at 14.4k, then 28k, then 56k, he only grew more interested.

A high school computer class changed things. His teacher, who scowled at the mention of Bonzi Buddy, made him promise to uninstall it and handed him a CD-R with Slackware scrawled on it. He got through fdisk to a KDE desktop, later bought a boxed copy of Mandrake off a Circuit City shelf, and years later rediscovered Linux properly on a little Sony VAIO with Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake. Mandrake first, then Dapper Drake. Today he does Linux OTC and Linux User Space, writes technical and opinionated pieces, and generally pushes free and open source software. The takes are not hot.

Dale

Distrohoppers’ Digest

Dale started on computers in the early eighties through friends and a neighbour whose IBM PC cost as much as a car. His own first machine was an Apple IIc around 1986, his second a 40MHz i386 in 1992, which he once took apart on the floor to chase a rattle, giving his mother a fright and finding a loose screw under the motherboard. After a computer repair course at the local career centre he built machines through a temp agency and found his first IT job. In November 1992 he started his own bulletin board, The Edge of Insanity, which grew to four phone lines and a 128K ISDN connection and was many people's first taste of the internet, later becoming a web and email hosting business on a 1U server in a colocation facility.

Linux arrived in 1995, when a caller to the board invited him over to see Slackware, and the following weekend they installed it from all seventy floppy disks. OpenBSD replaced it on his servers around 1998, Mandrake made desktop Linux stick around 1999, and Debian followed in 2001. After a merger brought mass layoffs in 2003 he sold the hosting business and enrolled in truck driving school as a temporary fix. Twenty years later he is still driving. He met Tony and Moss through the Linux Mint Telegram community, started submitting reviews to Distrohoppers' Digest, and was invited to join them in January 2020.