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My computer is an old workhorse. I bought it in 2018 that made it now no less then 6 year old. The age does not bother me as it does what I want, except for one thing: it is slow, really slow.
Booting to starting a webpage takes more than 4 minutes !! And shutting down takes around 50 seconds.
Most of this lack of speed is due to Windows. Windows is doing lots of things in the background. It is doing disk optimalization, virus checking and updating of the os and programs while I am working. And that slows everything down. Next to that every update of Windows brings new stuff which also may slow things down.
Three options:
- Learn to live with the speed limit
- Buy a new (faster) computer
- Switch to Linux which is a lot faster.
So I am slowly switching over to Linux.
I put Ubuntu on an USB stick. Each time I boot my system I press F12 to get to the Bios and choose if I want to boot from my harddisk with Windows or from the USB stick with Ubuntu. And since I started with this option a few weeks ago I find myself 98% of the time booting Linux. So I am considering to install it permanently on my harddisk. That may even make it faster.
Most of the software I use on my Windows setup also runs on Linux. There are versions of the Gimp, LibreOffice, Thonny, Arduino IDE, Media player, Firefox, Discord, Cura slicer and Raspberry Imager. So not a lot of difference between the two operating systems. Oh, and there is Cirkit for documenting breadboard setup for my stories. I use that a lot for my books and this weblog.
Cirkit is easy to use and it is easy to define your own components. I wrote a story on this which you can read here: https://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2022/08/create-new-component-in-cirkit.html
I only had a small problem. I have several self defined components and naturally I want to use them with Cirkit in Linux. So how do You transfer the components from Windows to Linux.
Locate the components in Windows
First thing is to find where Cirkit stores the self defined components in Windows.
There is a directory called userDefinedComponents and you can find it by following this path:
Windows/users/lvold/AppData/Roaming/CirkitDesigner/
In this directory there are two other directories called images and jsons.
The first directory (images) contains all the pictures of your user defined components. The second directory (jsons) contains the descriptions and the pin layout. You need both.
What I did was to copy both directories to a USB stick. Then I rebooted my computer in Linux.
Copying the components to Ubuntu
Now I had all my own designed components I had to copy them to the right directory in Cirkit under Linux.
This is how the menu structure of Cirkit initially looks. As you can see there are (naturally) no self defined components.
They need to be put into the following directory:
Home/snap/cirkit-designer/20/.config/cirkit-designer
First thing to do to find that directory is to enable viewing hidden files. 
So click the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines) at the left-top side of the window and activate Show Hidden Files.
Then click consecutively:
- snap
- cirkit-designer
- 20
- .config
- cirkit-designer
And then UserDefinedComponents.
Next copy the files from your USB stick (the images and jsons directories) to this location. And we are done.
Do not use this method if you already have defined some new components in Cirkit in Ubuntu as the files from the USB stick will overwrite your exisiting files.
And there they are. All my self-defined components ready to use with Cirkit in Ubuntu. Ready for new adventures !!!
Till next time.
Have fun
Luc Volders
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