I saw fvwm in a magazine and it had a really cool 3D look to it and I wanted that. I had never seen anything like that. We were very poor and I only had an old computer, a 486, so it was either pirate software (and there was no version of Windows in our language) or use Linux.

I ended up on Red Hat from a magazine and then later Slackware. I liked Window Maker so I stayed on that for two decades. Learning Linux gave me a constructive hobby, introduced me to free software philosophy, and gave me technology skills. We moved to the United States. When I was 15 or 16, I helped a college math professor install hardware on Linux. When he found out that I was dropping out of a very racist high school, he provided support and I ended up graduating from their college. Those Linux skills came in handy and helped start a career.

I have only ever used Windows to upgrade firmware on a laptop or to download an ISO so I could replace Windows. Like everyone else, I was enamoured with macOS back in the 2000’s but couldn’t afford one and when I finally could, it couldn’t do sloppy focus and that was a pet peeve of mine so I just returned it and got a used ThinkPad.

I moved back to Asia. Now I use sway on Debian and get to ride my bicycle to work and my kids grow up better than I did, so life is good.

Hah! I actually removed the second comment because it got a little derisive. But I’ll stand by my premise that Americans want/need bigger cars and handling was never an important thing in American car culture.

Those are great laptops and were well built. I think the 2011 might have the Radeon GPU issue though but if it’s lasted this long, you are probably safe.

My grail was a 17" MacBook Pro from that era. I saw one the other day at a tech market but the vendor wasn’t at the booth for me to make an offer =/. I’ll swing by again an see if I can get it for around $50. They really do live a second life as Linux machines and OWC keeps me supplied on replacement parts.

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And they don’t handle. Their cars, their motorbikes, they are simply unable to build something that goes around a corner well

There’s something like a 40 pound difference between the average American man and the average Chinese man.

So in a vehicle that seats five, there would be on average an extra 200 pounds of human sloshing around their seats while they steer one-handed with a burger in the other hand and a Big Gulp between their thighs.

Pretty sure the Punkt is my next phone and a Raspberry Pi 500+ is my next desktop.

Take me back to the start of the millennium. I’m tired of this shit.

Shame … North Carolina was once called the “Rip Van Winkle” state because it was so far behind everyone else. And it woke up briefly and briefly gave us a great public university system as well as Red Hat Linux. Then around the turn of the century, every racist boomer with a small pension from Jersey and New York sold their assets and moved down and bought up all of the old farmland and turned it into cardboard McMansions everywhere and made it MAGA heaven. That combined with all of the Fort Liberty homesteaders who spread out from Fayettenam like a cancer with their perpetual war contracts completely changed the state overnight.

A few years ago we had the biggest solar lobby in the country … the old families had turned the tobacco fields into solar farms and it was going well. But I guess even they have been crowded out of their own state. It’s a violent place now where people can shoot up the power stations to protest books and go unpunished, and spec ops guys can shoot working immigrants 200 yards from their property in “self defense” and not even be arrested.

It’s now just a stew of MAGA that keeps brewing to the point that the original flavor has been lost. It will only get saltier. The “University” system is now run by MAGAts. It takes generations to set up infrastructure like what was set up around the RTP area, and only a few years to undo it all.

Sorry North Carolina, I had to leave.

Crape Myrtle is the Bradford Pear of our time.