For the past month I distro hopped just to get back into the groove after a multi year hiatus. Currently settled down between Fedora 42 and Debian 13. A little (lot) back story: due to living situations I could only have a laptop, said laptop had suffered some mishaps such as a crack on the screen bezel and the cold winters here in New England, well hot machine + cold air = cracked screen. Then the battery is dead and because this model is disco no chance to get a new battery. So basically I have it permanently hooked up to AC plug and HMDI to my TV. Worse yet, it had Windows 8 installed when I bought it. (side note: I can’t get into BIOS or boot from USB stick)
Long time Windows users will understand what a heap of garbage Windows 8 is, and now I can’t install any new software on it; heck even Chrome tells me I need to upgrade to Windows 10 before it’ll allow any browser updates. Rather than buy a new computer I’m salvaging it because a) avoid e-waste b) I’m poor. So now I avoid the Windows 8 desktop altogether and just fire up VirtualBox.
It was so easy to migrate away from Windows because the UI of Windows 8 is so far away from the norm that a seasoned Windows user would throw their computer across the room. Because I’ve been away so long I feel like I have a fresh start and leave the nightmare behind.
At one point I had all three OS cultures running under my roof: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX. Yes I said OSX because I was using it in that era. From my recent journey into using a tiled WM setup in Linux I finally realized why I disliked the UI of OSX. It’s like a floating tile WM. Call me crazy but it drove me nuts using Photoshop in OSX when no document is open and I see thru to the desktop. Yeah I’m a single-document-interface kind of guy which is why I like tiling WMs like i3 and now Sway. I have better and predictable control of where app windows appear when opened.
So my setup is a broken laptop on life support, running Linux in VirtualBox. I went the WM route instead of a full desktop because of limited hardware resources and I feel surprisingly more productive. Funny story: long ago with my first PC running WIndows 95, I accidentally sent static shock to my PS/2 mouse and broke it. So I had to use keyboard only until I can replace the mouse. I learned every possible keyboard shortcut Windows has and I got as far as being able to play Solitaire. That probably explains my affinity to WM desktop setups.
Anyhoos. Hope to meet y’all.
Edit: forgot to mention while I was playing around with Macs, my proudest moment in Linux experience was wiping my iBook G4 and went full on Gentoo. Got everything to work, trackpa, wifi, radeon drivers with accelerated 3D.