# Journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 3: Delah Tux

By 2009, laptops were appearing everywhere, the FreeDOS machine had been retired and the XP machine was getting slower.  Ubuntu was becoming popular enough that I wasn't the only person in my town to know it even existed, and when I got my first laptop I promptly installed it alongside the disaster that is Windows Vista.  This machine had 1GB RAM, a 250GB HDD and a quad-core CPU so the experience was much smoother than the old XP machine.  Soon after, I would learn about Xubuntu and Linux Mint, both based on Ubuntu and just as easy to install.  Suddenly, I was overcome with distro-hopping fever and would spend the next seven years exploring the world of alternative operating systems.

Linux Mint had become the daily driver within months and I suspect it may have something to do with the resemblance to the Windows UI.  Familiarity is key when introducing new users to an alternative to something they've always known. In fact this very idea is what prompted me to delete Vista and replace it with Windows XP for a bit, only to (once again) delete Windows entirely and use Linux full-time when I became comfortable enough.  Of course the lack of support for many games prompted me to reinstall it soon after and continue dual-booting.  This alternating pattern of deleting and reinstalling Windows would continue for more than five years as I struggled to break free of my dependence on it.

Over a dozen operating systems were tested on this machine, leaving me with a pile of CDs for anything I could download.  That doesn't even include anything which could boot from a flash drive.  There were some interesting options like Puppy Linux, Slax and SliTaz, the rather slow and boring OpenSolaris (which isn't even Linux), the less popular Mandrake/Mandriva (I don't remember which, maybe it was both?).  At one point I tried something called Phoenix, which ironically caused the computer to get unusually hot!  There were many obscure distributions which would pique my interest, and one of them was Void Linux. I think it was the name that stood out, but at the time there was nothing in particular about this distribution that would interest me enough to keep it for more than a few days.  That would certainly change years later when we'd meet again under different circumstances.

Linux Mint would continue to be the daily driver on this machine as it seemed like the most usable and was (at the time) reliable enough.  While I wanted to like some of the original Linux distributions such as Debian, their overall configuration and behavior differed substantially from what I had grown accustomed to.  Some distributions were never tried because I wasn't willing to commit the time, most notably Gentoo and other source-based distros.

When this laptop began to literally fall apart, it was replaced with an Acer Aspire "netbook" with a 10.1" display and less horsepower, probably running Windows 7 by then.  I installed Ubuntu for the first time in over a year to find they changed the user interface to some nonsense side-bar which I hated. It was also quite slow on that machine, so it was promptly tossed out and replaced with Linux Mint, followed by Xubuntu in an attempt to further reduce the memory usage.  This would later be replaced by a larger laptop that could just barely play Minecraft, but that got broken less than four months later when I wrecked the unicycle.

Yes, I said unicycle.  For a few years, my only mode of of transportation was a 26" unicycle with 7" cranks, often riding over five miles at a time because I didn't like riding the bus.  I would even ride this thing uphill while hauling a Busch Pressman 4x5" camera with two Grafmatic sheet film holders and a 2.5lb tripod.  I'm sure you can imagine how unpleasant that was, but I was in much better shape and ate like a pig back then.

It seems exposure to Windows and Linux Mint must have brainwashed me into thinking all operating systems are supposed to be identical in the way they handle everyday tasks, so a great deal of Linux (and non-Linux) operating systems were never given much of a chance.  One excellent example is FreeBSD, much to my later regret as I don't even know what was wrong with it back then. Still others were interesting but thought to be unusable as a daily driver, including ReactOS and Plan 9.  Later I would learn about Redox OS, Harvey OS, Popcorn Linux and some others, but would never get around to trying them. Looking back, I wasn't so much interested in the operating system itself but was more focused on the user interface and available software that could be installed without building from source.

Rather than get to know the system and customize it to my own desires, I was relying on the prepackaged experience as provided by the default install. Only near the end of the Delah Tux period would I start to seriously consider what a specific system actually offered, but by then the desire to explore was losing momentum.

The last laptop from this period was a cheap HP machine purchased sometime in 2012 that had a quad-core A8-4500M APU, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD. I recall standing in the Best Buy looking at a long line of laptops, all of them having Intel processors and price tags that were beyond my budget. Somewhere in this expensive mix was a single AMD machine which also happened to be the only sub-$500 laptop in the entire store.  The salesman seemed unhappy that I had chosen this piece of junk over all the others and in spite of his objections. It came with Windows 8 pre-installed, but I had it set up for dual-booting Linux Mint.

By now the DOS machine was gone, the XP machine was a skeleton with no disks and the Acer Aspire had a busted screen.  For the next four years I would replace Mint as the daily driver and try Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Tails, only to circle back to Mint again despite some cracks appearing in the reliability of this old workhorse.  I'd even upgraded to Windows 10 because I was curious about some of the changes and was excited to FINALLY have virtual desktops on Windows (without relying on third-party software).  In 2016 I replaced Mint with Xubuntu in the hopes that it would use less RAM, but it was becoming impossible for me to avoid the obvious;

Software is getting bigger and slower for no apparent reason.

=> ./index.gmi Index
=> ./4.gmi Ch. 4: The Byte Plague
=> ../../index.gmi Home