I grew up in Southern California in the 70s and 80s. When I was in elementary school, Steve Jobs donated an Apple IIe to every elementary, junior and high school in California. My schools were recipients. In junior high, I took “computer literacy” as an elective. I learned what a “mouse” was in that class. Around that same time, Steve Wozniak staged the epic Us Festival right in my home town.
This was the early days of consumer personal computers. The IBM PC had recently come out, so had the Osborne (which was “portable”), the Kaypro, the Commodore 64 and the TRS-80 . Computers were finally affordable to middle-class families and my dad was keen to get one.
OmniTrans
My dad was the general manager of my home town’s public transit system. A few of its busses were used to shuttle “dignitaries,” including an 11 year-old me, to and from the Us Festival grounds at Glen Hellen Regional Park in Devore, CA, the place I first learned to fish with my grandmother.
The Apple years
Dad considered all of the “PC” brands on the market at the time, spent months doing the research. In the end he (and many other parents in California) did just what Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak hoped we would do. He reasoned that since the kids were learning on Apple computers at school, that’s what we should have at home.
Our family’s first computer was an Apple IIe, followed in a few years by the Apple IIc (Apple’s version of a “portable” computer — the “c” stands for “compact”) and finally, in my senior year of high school, the Apple IIgs (the “Woz” signature model).
Most of my primary and secondary school years were spent behind an Apple II-series computer. Mavis Beacon taught me to type on the IIe in junior high. I learned BASIC by typing programs from a big spiral-bound book. In high school, I was a fan of Infocom’s text based adventure games like the Zork Trilogy and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which also helped me develop my typing chops). The first “office suite” I ever used was AppleWorks, with which I wrote all of my high school papers. I brought the IIe to college with me and used AppleWorks all through undergrad in the early 90s.
Infocommies
As a kid I learned how to notch a floppy disk to make it double-sided and writable. In high school I had a nerdy group of friends who called ourselves the Infocommies. We’d gather at each other’s houses after school and trade games, often the latest Infocom title, by copying our notched floppies.
Apples of my childhood’s eye
From Woz to Jobs
My first actual Mac was a Macintosh Color Classic, which I bought with college graduation money. I played a lot of Crystal Quest on that machine. I followed that with an LC 475 (also known as the Quadra 605, it bore the “pizza box” form factor). I took the LC 475 with me to graduate school. I explored this cool new thing called the World Wide Web on it using a “browser” called Mosaic. After graduate school, I bought my first laptop, a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, marketed at the time as “the fastest laptop in the world.”
I began my post-college professional life with the PowerBook G3. It was a great machine for its day. But my professional world was a Windows world; specifically, a Microsoft Office world. While I had MS Office on my PowerBook, at the time there was definitely a lot lost in translation when a Mac user and a PC user passed a Word doc back and forth. There was no “cloud” at the time. My having a Mac started to become more of a liability than an asset in my professional life.
My Mac years
Journey to the Dark Side
As my issues with compatibility continued, my PowerBook started showing its age and would soon need to be replaced. Up ’till then, I’d always been an Apple Guy. I’d been using Apple products since the US Festival rolled through my hometown. I’d always thought “Windoze” was for squares. The OS was clunky and everything needed a driver in order to run properly. It wasn’t Fun!
But then, a friend of mine who worked for none other than IBM offered to lend me her employee discount toward a pretty sweet PC Multimedia Package with a tower, monitor, external speakers, and a CD-ROM(!). I couldn’t buy a similarly appointed new Mac for that price. So around the year 2000, I reluctantly traded my Apple heritage for a friend’s employee discount and bought an actual IBM PC.
I owned a string of “PCs” after that. One thing I definitely appreciated about them is that their hardware is much more hackable than Macs. After I switched to PCs, many of my machines were custom builds (often made from spare parts I brought home from the office as the Windows machines there were upgraded). It wasn’t so easy to scavenge Mac parts to cobble together a “new” machine, but using PC architecture, I could build home theater machines, servers for files and media, and my own personal “Frankenstein” machine that was stuffed with as many hard drives as its ports would support. PC parts are fast and cheap. The OS they typically ran on is bloated and clunky compared to a Mac but I began to see the utility of that trade-off.
I particularly enjoyed building home servers out of spare PC parts. I still do. My first builds used Windows Home Server. I think I built one for every member of my family. WHS was a solid home server OS until MS introduced Windows Home Server 2011 and removed support for its Drive Extender functionality, the primary reason most users used WHS. Many home server enthusiasts abandoned WHS after this, including me.
FOSS, the gateway drug
In the early 2000s, I also started relying more heavily on free and open-source software (FOSS). I’d been using BitTorrent for a while to find “cracked” versions of Windows software. But that became a hassle, “crack codes” didn’t always crack the code and you often had to download two or three versions of software before you found one that worked. Not to mention the less-than-legal aspect of it all.
Then I discovered open-source titles that did a decent enough job replacing their proprietary analogs. FOSS titles such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice do an excellent job of replacing Microsoft Office. GIMP and Inkscape are excellent replacements for PhotoShop and Illustrator, respectively. Document sharing had become much easier than it had been after I got out of grad school. So I’d been gradually replacing my proprietary software titles with FOSS ones on my Windows machines.
I’d always been Linux-curious. I didn’t know what a “distro” was at the time but I knew Linux was free. In 2009, I came across a blog post about this Linux “version” called Ubuntu. This was around Hardy Heron. At the time, I was also playing around with the free version of VMware‘s virtualization software (I use VirtualBox today), so I spun up a virtual machine with this new Ubuntu.
It was fun! There was a bit of a learning curve. But Ubuntu’s (2009) UI was similar enough to both Mac and Windows that I was able to find my way around. I liked that many of the FOSS titles I’d been using on Windows were defaults in Ubunbu. Soon enough, I learned what a Linux distro was. And that some distros are based on other distros. I created virtual machines for many of them.
Around that time, I also came across the Debian Linux based home server OS, Open Media Vault (OMV). As mentioned above, the Borg was beginning to assimilate Windows Home Server into something unrecognizable and I was looking for a replacement. So I built a new server out of some parts I had in the bone pile and installed OMV on it. This was my first official Linux machine.
It was great! Working with OMV provided me with the opportunity to learn Linux while not having to rely on it as a “daily driver.” It mainly served music and video files that my Windows-based “home theater” was consuming.
Making the transition
Several of my Windows machines were HP Pavilion laptops. The reason I had several of them is that Pavilions are solid, utilitarian machines. With few frills, they just worked. HP Pavilions also easily accommodate Linux.
I had an older one in the closet, so as I was learning Linux via OMV , I dropped an .ISO on a thumb drive and in 15 minutes I was setting Ubuntu up on the older Pavilion. It was awesome! I couldn’t do this nearly as easily with a Mac.
Additionally, even though I installed Ubuntu on an older HP machine, I barely saw any performance difference between it and my current Windows HP.
Making the commitment
After several months switching between Windows and Linux, I decided that Linux would serve my needs perfectly going forward. Around this time, I’d also changed careers to web development and, as it turns out, the web runs on Linux. I’d sampled several distros over the years but Ubuntu seemed to be the most solid. Plus, all of the dev tools I used were perfectly compatible with the web servers I was communicating with.
So, around 2010/11, after backing my files up to my OMV server, I scrubbed Windows from my main HP Pavilion machine and started over with Ubuntu. I’ve been “Linux native” ever since.
True native
When my Pavilion started showing its age and I was ready for a new machine, I wanted a soup-to-nuts Linux machine, hardware and software. My search lead me to System76. Based in the United States, System76 is a quality hardware manufacturer focused solely on GNU/Linux. According to their Brand Manual (PDF), System76 makes “open source tools for the curious and capable makers of tomorrow,” a mission I can get behind.
My first System76 machine was the now-discontinued Gazelle. I was a freelance web developer at the time and it was interesting meeting clients with this machine in tow. Neither Mac nor Windows, the “System76” logo on the clam shell frequently prompted questions and comments. Designwise, it’s obviously not a Mac so many prospective clients assumed it was a Windows manufacturer they hadn’t heard of before.
“You don’t use Windows? How do you … (fill in the blank)?”
I would use such questions as a springboard to expound upon the benefits of open-source software and architecture. And also, did I mention? The Internet runs on Linux! — and so can you.
Going pro
In 2017, I was hired in my current positon as a web developer at UC Santa Cruz. At that point I updated to an Oryx Pro, which I used for my first few years on the job. This thing was a beast. I liked the Oryx but for one thing: the fan. That thing would constantly fire up and it sounded like I lived next to an airport. It was also more machine than I needed for the work I was doing.
The University provides me with a new machine every 2-3 years, so when my next opportunity came around, I went a bit more compact with the Lemur Pro, my current machine.
I love this little guy! While smaller than the Oryx, it has NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) and DDR5 RAM, this thing packs a punch! It’s fast and quiet.
My one quibble with it is the battery. I’m on my second one. The reason is battery bulge. And the reason, I suspect, for the battery bulge is that I keep my Lemur “docked” most of the time — sitting on my desk, clam shell closed, connected to two external monitors and an external keyboard and mouse. The power supply is nearly always plugged in. Ok. Lesson learned. However, the beauty of open-source hardware as well as software is that I was able to buy a replacement battery and fix it myself.
If the University’s replacement schedule holds true, I’ve still got a year or two left with the Lemur. But I’m already perusing System76’s website for the next one. Considering the battery bulge issues with my laptop, I might opt for something compact like the Meerkat. Who knows?
I’ve also sampled System76’s POP!_OS. I may switch over to it one day but for now I’m sticking with the tried-and-true Ubuntu. It serves my development purposes just fine.
Linux can compete
“Linux” has come a long way since Linus Torvalds cobbled together its kernel in 1991. Once the domain of hobbyists and hard-core nerds (two subcultures I am firmly ensconsed in), the Linux ecosystem provides plenty of consumer-friendly distros that provide as much utility, functionality and fun(!) as either MacOS or Windows. And it’s all free. Proprietary software is expensive. Operating system license fees are expensive. Hardware is expensive. Going Linux allows you to eleminate two of those expenses, and with the money you save you can invest more heavily in the third. Seems like win-win to me.