Mac vs. Win. Win vs. Mac. How about, "No, thank you"? I dislike binary paradigms. On Twitter I've had shitlibs accuse me of being a Nazi. On Gab I've had wannabe Nazis accuse me of being a shitlib. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Yes, I am a conservative with some libertarian leanings, but I do not agree with the whole Ayn Rand philosophy that businesses will always do what is best as long as the government leaves them alone. This is proven to not work. Having worked on Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance at an IT company many years ago as the result of the Enron scandal, I realize that there does need to be some government oversight as well as regulations.
So taking a look at my homepage, one might come to the mistaken conclusion that I am some kind of hipster. Not really. I'm actually the type of person hipsters try to be. Hipsters are the younger crowd who grew up with Playstation 2 and GameCube consoles, DVDs, and iPods. Well, the reason why I like 16-bit consoles, laserdiscs, and MiniDiscs is because that's the generation I came from. Hipsters intentionally seek out obsolete technologies like VHS cassettes and records because I assume they want to be different from everyone else. I've never known such a person, but I imagine they want to say stuff like "I just got the movie Akira on VCD!" just so that their friends would reply, "Wow, what's a VCD?" and the hipster could feel good about himself for knowing about stuff others don't, and enjoys it when his friends say "That's so cool" when he shows them something they never knew about.
I suppose there is a streak in me that compels me to be different than others. When I was in high school, I was into Alternative music instead of Top 40 crap. But while other kids were into stupid-ass Grunge music, I was more interested in Dreampop and was all alone in my tastes. Nobody else liked listening to The Ocean Blue CDs like I did. I was the only anime nerd I knew of in high school. I wore my Macross and Urusei Yatsura T-shirts to school and I never saw any other kids wearing that.
So in terms of computers, I am a bit nostalgic for the bygone days of the late '80s. Back then, you'd buy an IBM clone PC for business, an Atari for music, a Mac for publishing, or an Amiga for video production. By around 1990, the selection had been whittled down to just PCs and Macs. My family's first computer was a 286AT with 1mb of RAM. We bought it in 1988 or so. My computer prowess was built on a DOS prompt. It wasn't until later that we got Windows 3.1 for our computer, and I didn't even really care for it. It wasn't until the mid-'90s when I got Internet access did I really start to use Windows. Before then, the most use we got out of Windows was when Mom played Solitaire. But getting internet access to work on Windows 3.1 was such a chore, having to download the WINSOCK.DLL file, getting a modem term program to work for dialup internet access, etc.
Our family eventually got a copy of Windows 3.11, which was alright. Windows 95 was rather different. I laughed at the "Start" button. "What the heck is that for?" I asked. Eventually I got used to it. Windows 98 came out and it was much better, and then Windows 98 Second Edition was pretty great. Millennium Edition sucked. XP was very nice, and eventually I got it for the age of high speed internet. Vista came along, and it sucked. Win7 made up for it. Eventually I had to migrate to it. It was alright, although it made some menus needlessly complex. I got used to it. Then Win8 came along and it was a joke. Win10 is now what we're all supposed to use, but I really do not care for it.
Back around in '06 or so, my friend Lou helped me install Linux Fedora on my very old, outdated laptop. It was a Win98SE laptop that I had with me when I first lived in Japan in 2000-2002. It was not powerful enough to run XP, but Fedora ran just fine on it. This was my first exposure to Linux, and I liked it. Linux breathed new life into that laptop, and it became useful once again. I'd taken a Unix class in junior college, so I was a bit familiar with some of the terminal commands and how they are different from DOS. Linux has you use the terminal (the "command prompt") from time to time, and I like that.
I chose Fedora with the KDE user interface. I liked how the menu was on the top of the screen instead of the bottom like Windows, and the status bar on the bottom of the screen. It felt different for sure, but it also felt intuitive. Eventually, that laptop was stolen when our house was broken into. I remember that day fairly clearly. As my family and I were getting into our car to go to the grocery store, I noticed some Hispanics sitting in a car nearby, staring at us. I felt uncomfortable, but we drove away. We were only gone for about 40 minutes or so, and when we came back, we realized our home had been burglarized. The thieves stole Mayu's diamonds she never wore, which was pretty incredible because they were buried in our closet and not very easy to find. They ignored all my video game crap and stole my old laptop, thinking that they must've stolen something valuable. Hey you idiots, you stole an old, useless laptop. Good going. With the insurance money I received from the theft, I was able to buy a new laptop for half the price I had paid for the stolen one.
So for several years now, I'd been getting sick of Windows and Microsoft. Every other OS release of theirs has sucked. All this time, I was thinking I might go exclusively Linux, but I was a bit hesitant and nervous to do so. It's such a big leap of faith to abandon what has been familiar all these years. I'd had problems with Fedora because there was much I still had yet to learn at that time about Linux. I thought that if I were to migrate fully to Linux, I wouldn't have my friend Lou to help me out with any problems since I live in Japan and he doesn't. But then I started learning about Ubuntu and how popular it is, because of its ease of use and wide support. Ubuntu was the first distribution of Linux that made the effort for mass appeal. Thanks to Ubuntu, no longer was Linux just for tech-heads, but more accessible to everyone.
Some computers I use at work are Win10. I really, really do not like Win10. With Win7, clicking on the Start button would bring up a menu in the corner of the screen. Doing so in Win10 brought up a jibungous menu that takes up 2/3rds of the screen. No thanks. And all of the programs are listed alphabetically, rather than grouped by the type of program. Perhaps there is a way to change this, and I have heard of ways of hacking Win10 to make it feel more comfortable, but it all seems like such a hassle. On top of that, Win10 is far more intrusive, and even though you can turn a lot of it off, it still spies on you. No thanks. And why does it take such a long time to load up the image viewing program? With Win7, I could click on an image file and the Windows image viewer would load it right up (except for .gif files, for some stupid reason). But with Win10, at least on all of the ones I have used, it takes forever for the image viewing software to load up.
So last fall when Microsoft started telling Win7 users that our OS would cease to be supported as of January 14th, 2020, I figured that this was going to be my final motivation to migrate to Linux. I started watching lots of informative videos on migrating to Linux. Probably the most interesting and useful was from a channel called Chris Titus Tech. It was his recommendation that Mint is the perfect Linux distribution for Win7 people wanting to avoid having to migrate to Win10. Just as Fedora is a derivative of Red Hat, Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. It's a flavor of Ubutnu specifically tailored towards Windows users and recruiting them to Linux.
A video by another user showed how to use a virtual box to install Linux onto a virtual machine in order to test Linux out. But I learned after I had burned a Mint Cinnamon install ISO onto a DVD and loaded it up on my computer, I was able to run the OS right off of the disc! I was able to get into my Gmail account and I did a Hangouts vidchat with Lou just from the DVD alone, without having to install anything. It's pretty amazing how slim and no-nonsense Linux is.
So January 14th came and went, and I was still not ready to completely migrate. Lou had sent me a hand-me-down hard drive I could use to swap out one of my smaller hard drives. He also sent me a spare Raspberry Pi 3 to play around with. The standard OS to install on a Raspberry Pi is called Raspbian, a derivative of Debian Linux. After looking up some info on OS options for the Pi, I went with the ARM version of Ubutnu Mate as it was said to be a solid, complete distribution for the Pi. I liked how it had two panels, on the top and bottom of the screen. Very nice. The Pi 3 mostly gets used for watching YouTube on the TV in the living room, especially by my daughter.
Once I backed everything up from my desktop computer's hard drive, I was finally ready to migrate. Lou had also given me a spare solid state drive (SSD) on which I had installed a test version of Mint Cinnamon. I liked it, and Cinnamon is very intuitive to anyone who is comfortable with XP or 7. But I like the versatility of the Mate interface as experienced on the Pi, so on February 10th, I installed Mint Mate on my computer.
Since then, I have felt very liberated. I have cancelled my subscription to Avast. They recently got into trouble for spying on their customers, and I no longer need an antivirus program now that I have Linux. That's a couple hundred dollars every other year that I will save. Plus, I did not have to pay for Win10, since Linux is free and open source. There are a few things that are slightly inconvenient, but I am just having to learn things as I go along.
When I was still on Win7, pretty much everything I used was already on Linux, or at least an equivalent. I prefer Firefox as a web browser, and Firefox comes by default in Linux. I use Thunderbird as an email client and Filezilla for FTP, and those are also available on Linux. I use GIMP for image editing and Shotcut for video editing which I use for my YouTube channel, and both of these work much, much faster in Linux. In fact, Gimp would always take quite a long time to load up in Windows, but it loads up within a few seconds now. I had problems with Shotcut running slowly and the sound being glitchy on Windows, most likely due to my computer being an older computer. But now it works a lot more smoothly.?
It's been over four months since I migrated to Linux, and I haven't looked back yet. I do not regret my decision. There are a few programs I miss, but installing new programs in Linux is far more convenient. I had filled up my Windows registry with installing too many lousy programs on a hit-and-miss basis, installing a program only to discover it didn't work, and also being unsure if it came with malware and such. I'd had installed programs that were supposedly freeware, only to learn that their functionality was extremely limited unless I paid for the full version. Linux has given me a far greater ease of mind knowing that installing new programs is not taking a risk because of the environment of accountability that Linux demands.
I should point out that while Linux Mint is very user-friendly and aimed at being easy for Windows users, it still can be difficult at times. For example, when I downloaded K3b for burning CDs and DVDs, I couldn't start burning projects right away. It gave me an error and I had to enable MP3 support. Another time it told me I had to enable permissions to the disc writer, even though I'd already burned some other types of discs with no problems. I believe the reason behind this is because different media have different codecs, and since Linux is a collaborative effort, I just had to seek these out to enable. In situations like this, I've had to just do a web search on what to do. Often times all it entails is entering commands in terminal to install stuff to get things working right. The benefits of a peace of mind when it comes to security and zero cost computing far outweighs the occasional inconveniences. No malicious website can stick a .EXE file on your computer and have it autoinstall something you don't want. Everything requires a password and that crap is made to screw up Windows computers anyway.
So now that I've broken free of the binary PC paradigm, I guess I can afford to be smug and look down on others. Maybe. Either way, it's been a great experience to experience the freedom that Linux provides.
Next is the Toy and Car Museum in Ikaho.
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mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net