Back in the early days of 1995, I picked up a Slackware CD from the computer shop I worked at in lieu of payment with no idea what it was or how to use it. This was my first foray into the world of Linux. From that point I used Linux off and on sporadically until I moved past the tinkering phase of college, watching the rise and fall of new technologies and better and better innovation, and just wanting things to work like I expected out of the box.

However, in the last few years I have stopped being excited about new innovation. Because with it comes not an exciting new world, but a plethora of subscription models, paywalls, data mining, and general enshitification that has become the norm in tech. Things have stopped working like I expect out of the box. In fact, I am having to actively twist and bend them to do what I want without compromising my privacy and my wallet.

Which leads me to present day and I decided to try throwing Ubuntu onto an ancient laptop headed to the scrap heap. It worked flawlessly right out of the box. With the addition of a little ram, I was able to set up a new media server running dockers, pihole and several other applications that would have taken me extensive time and money to get working like I wanted in a mainstream OS.

I found myself excited again about technology.

So last weekend I pulled up my daily driver gaming rig with the intention of shrinking down the pre-installed Windows operating system and trying Ubuntu there as my mainstream OS. Which is where I discovered that it was in fact not a single 2 TB drive inside, but a set of 1 TB drives configured in raid 0, taking up both M2 slots. So my fun little weekend project was once again thwarted by an off the shelf configuration that wasn’t quite what it advertised.

It’s just a roadblock to a journey that’ll require a little more time and money to do safely, keeping the old drive intact while I migrate to something new and better. But that’s okay. Storage is cheap and booting the try-out OS from a USB drive was exceeding my expectations.

I’m eager to move forward and see how Proton works in an environment where it can shine. I want to see how much open source software can replace the bloated and clunky OS on my current machine. I want to learn Python and move past the power shell knowledge I’ve had to build in the workforce.

See you all again real soon.