the_personal_computer
Spawn
Growing up with two older brothers introduced me to the greatest video games of all time. I was able to play their hand-me-downs from the Gameboy, DS, N64, Gamecube, and Xbox. As with most people who fall down the video game pipeline I eventually felt the need to ascend, and that’s when I found out about PC gaming.
The Tinkerer
To me, my oldest brother was an elite hacker because he homebrewed our Wii. This was my introduction to modding. When I got my first phone, an iPhone 4, I was upset at the customization it offered and eventually I found out about jailbreaking. With my brother’s help I jailbroke it and was introduced to a whole new world of custom firmware/software. I was so fascinated with tweaking my phone to be exactly how I wanted it. This feeling stuck with me and even today I am an avid customizer.
Windows
When I was around 11 years old my dad bought me my very own laptop. It was a Toshiba SATELLITE L450D and came with Windows 7. Ever sinced then I’ve used Windows as my primary operating system even after eventually building a PC and upgrading it multiple times. Windows was the only operating system that I really knew how to use and it supported gaming. Growing up on Windows 7 was swag because it looked nice and was fast. I knew about Mac OS and Linux but always thought they were for working and not gaming, which is why I never had a need to stop using Windows.
Eventually in highschool I began learning more about operating systems and as Windows kept updating I slowly started to get frustrated. Forced updates, complicated configuration, and ads were what really irretated me. I knew that these problems were solvable and found hacks online to mitigate these annoyances to the best of my ability, but I was still upset that my operating system, which I own, is out of my control.
Linux
As I entered university, I majored in cybersecurity. Proficiency in Linux is a must in this field, and I began learning and using the terminal as well as installing virtual machines. The more research I did, the more I viewed Linux as what an operating system should be. Personal computers are owned and controlled by people, not corporations. I eventually found out that gaming on Linux had gotten to a point where most of the games I play were playable on Linux with the same performance as Windows.
I made the leap a few years before this blog post, and used Arch Linux with KDE Plasma as my daily driver for months. Not everything worked out of the box, but I liked that. I didn’t have to deal with a complex registry to configure my software, I wasn’t forced to send telemetry data to a corporation, and I didn’t have to look at ads when I needed to search for files.
To this day I still use Arch Linux as my main operating system that I game and work on. I’ve since migrated to hyprland, and while setting it up I felt like I was a kid tweaking his jailbroken iPhone again.
pce,
bonta