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kbtidwell

Member

Registered: 2023-05-21

Posts: 6

Hello from Alabama!

Hi, everyone.

I'm a hope-to-be-published author, grandfather, tech lover, and Linux devotee, and I live around 60 miles north of Birmingham, Alabama. I seriously enjoy resurrecting old technology because life has made me a frugal kind of guy, but much of the fun from it are the clever tricks needed to make old stuff run like new. Linux is a great part of my hobby, and since I enjoy puzzles, I can say that Linux is definitely a great thing for people who want to exercise their brain! Never a dull moment, especially when persuading Windows programs to run under Linux lol.

I first fell in love with the idea of home computers back in the early '80's. Dad brought home a Timex-Sinclair 1000 computer that had a raging 2K of RAM (we later got the deluxe 16K expansion block that plugged in the back!) We hooked it up to the ol' 13" black and white TV, connected a tape cassette player for storage, and I learned BASIC on it. I was 12. Back then Radio Shack was in full swing, and I wanted a TRS-80 Color Computer badly. I'd never seen such a wonderful machine! I can't remember how much it cost in the catalog, but I knew it was beyond my little allowance. My 13th summer I talked my uncle into letting me work for him in his air conditioning and heating business, so I started saving money.

I ended up buying a Commodore 64, which turned out to be an excellent choice. $288 got me a real computer that in my opinion was better than the TRS-80 or the Texas Instruments TI-99a that my friend had. I moved to a Commodore 128 later in the '80's, which with it's CP/M mode, introduced me to a Linux-like mindset even though Linux hadn't quite been born yet. In 1992 I bought my first IBM clone, a 386DX-40 with a 40MB hard drive for the low, low price of $1500! That was the sweet spot for computer prices back then, and it's still amazing to me that today's tech is comparably so much cheaper.

I learned MS-DOS on the clone, and of course it came with Windows 3.1. Through the years I upgraded that desktop until I reached its limits, and by that time Windows Vista was current. It was certainly different than all of the earlier Windows versions I had used, but I never seemed to have the problems that everyone talked about. I played a LOT of the first Halo and Halo 2 on that machine!

In 2012 I built my first desktop from complete scratch, and used an Intel i5-2500K processor. I built it for upgradeability, and I'm still using it, thought the video card has been updated several times, and it's full of SSD's now instead of spinning drives. It still plays new games very well, but I'm no pro gamer, so I don't require perfection in AAA games. It does run Crysis very well though! Most of my gaming I now do on an Acer Nitro 5 I got last August. After its 1 year warranty is up I'm going to dual-boot Linux on it too.

Today, right now, for the moment, I'm running RebornOS, an Arch distro. That's one of over forty I've hopped in the last two to three years. I started with Mint back in 2014, dabbling around with it, but really got into Linux when I got interested in refurbishing old laptops to see what new life I could get out of them. I've very much enjoyed Debian-based, Arch-based, and Fedora distros, and the standouts have been LMDE5 Cinnamon , MXLinux XFCE, Garuda Dragonized KDE, Zorin XFCE, BigLinux KDE, and a few others I can't recall right now, but RebornOS has the right feel for me this minute. I wish I could say I like SUSE-based stuff, but I just can't. It feels...stilted?

Ok, the writer in me needs to shut down, but if it was too long you wouldn't have made it this far! I've posted over in the Desktop section about a small problem I'm having with the taskbar, but I wanted to say hello to everyone here. I hope you all have a great Sunday!

Last edited by kbtidwell (2023-05-21 14:02:08)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,499

Re: Hello from Alabama!

Hello and welcome to the forum.

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