Officially retired from the local Public Library (think of it as old school IT), I have a retirement gig there reshelving books three afternoons a week. Mainly to shoot the breeze and inflict mayhem. I mess around with my fleet of Linux boxes ouside of work.

I’ve been using computers since a Z-80 with CP/M. Founded my own software firm back then before learning I’m not cut out to run a business. I like the work too much.

My first UNIX was SCO in the 80s. Dabbled with Minix and Linux in the 90s but work requirements kept it to dabbling.

Back when one person could do such a thing part-time, I ran a small web hosting firm on RedHat until it became commercial, then switched to CentoOS. Because I needed Dreamweaver, I kept a Windows box for desktop work.

Shortly after Ubuntu appeared I moved my desktop (except Dreamweaver) to it, retaining the Windows box for Dreamweaver.

Sold the business just months before the Global Financial Crisis on 2008, happy that I had a government job to fall back on.

Dumped Windows completely then and stuck with Unbuntu just out of habit. I liked Unity, but couldn’t quite get comfortable with Gnome. Traded to Ubuntu Studio when it was XFCE-based, then liked the transition to KDE a couple of years later.

Post-retirement, I slowly became dissatisfied and started distro shopping. I settled on rolling distros as being right for me right now, and chose the Arch-based ones. Everything runs Arch or an Arch downstream.

Primarily an AMD fan, I’ve built my own desktop PCs for decades now. Bought a Framework 13 (also AMD) when they came out becasue it was the losest I could get to rolling my own.

Recently discovered corporate lease trade-in laptops are really, really cheap yet still with plenty of performance, hence the embarassingly large fleet of Intel Dell Latitudes that share my apartment.