A journey through operating systems and time

    A journey through operating systems and time

    This is a personal history of all the major operating systems I've used over the decades. Maybe this will be interesting for someone to read, but I'm mainly writing it down in case I forget.

    Windows 95/ME (2001 - 2003)

    As a millennial, my first ever computer experience was with a big beige CRT monitor/computer running Windows 95. It belonged to someone at my parents' office who used it part-time for ... spreadsheets maybe?

    I dunno what he actually used it for, hopefully nothing important, because I remember clicking around on random things and changing random settings to see what happened. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Since I could barely read, so I mostly had to memorize the icons to effectively carry out my business. Who knows what kind of havoc I caused (in)advertently.

    I did manage to run a couple of games on it. From what I recall, you could measure the gaming performance in SPF rather than FPS and it regularly blue screen'd.

    Windows XP (2003 - 2010)

    The first computer I owned was an HP Pavilion a1000 (Pentium 4 Extreme). It came with Windows XP which I consider to be the best Windows experience (adjusted for technological progress) of all time. It was orders of magnitude better than its predecessor and the shittification of Windows had yet to begin.

    With appropriate RAM and GPU upgrades, I was able to do a fair amount of gaming on that machine. Today, it's mostly still original except for a custom water cooling loop I installed just for fun.

    Windows 7 (2010 - 2014)

    By the time Windows 7 rolled up, I was already starting to become intrigued by this other operating system called Linux, or more precisely, GNU+Linux. But I had to begrudingly continue with Windows as my primary computing activity in these days was still video games.

    Ubuntu 11.04 (2011 - 2012)

    Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwahl" was the first Linux distribution I ever used. Technically, I previously tried Knoppix from a CD that came with a tech magazine, but I never got very far with it. Ubuntu had a nice GUI installer for children like me.

    I found alternatives for pretty much every application I used, except for games, so I had to keep Ubuntu on a secondary laptop instead of my primary machine.

    Backtrack 5 (2012)

    For a few solid months in 2012, I main'd Backtrack 5 which happened to coincide perfectly with the absolute peak of my teenage angst. Typical day-to-day activities included running reaver against my neighbor's Wifi, sqlmap on random websites, and Metasploit against my friends' routers.

    I never actually succeeded in hacking anything, but I learned quite a bit about security that has stuck with me to this day.

    Arch Linux (2013 - 2024)

    Sometime in 2013, I installed Arch Linux from a CD-ROM on an old laptop. Back in those days, I remember having to gather entropy by typing randomly on the keyboard while pacstrap was generating SSH host keys.

    I can't quite remember where I heard about Suckless, but I immediately hooked myself up with the suite: dwm, dmenu, and st.

    Windows 10 (2018)

    This is a weird departure, but something possessed me in college to get a Microsoft Surface running Windows 10. I thought it might be nice for taking notes in class or maybe it was Microsoft's subliminal presence in the CS building which was donated by Bill Gates.

    Anyway, I soon came to my senses and sold that thing on ebay. I replaced it with a System76 Galago Pro running Ubuntu.

    macOS (2020 - 2024)

    macOS is standard issue at my job. I had never really used it very much before, but I knew many developers that used it, so I was open trying it.

    I learned to live with macOS for several years, but I didn't really enjoy using it as much as Arch Linux. So I just SSH'd into it from Arch and did most of my work that way ;).

    Given that the word Linux was literally in my job title, IT was eventually able to give me a proper Linux machine. It came with Ubuntu LTS which refused to boot after the very first apt upgrade (just werks XD), so I saw an opportunity to try NixOS.

    NixOS (2024 - ???)

    After starting the goldboot project, many people expressed the sentiment "just use NixOS". So I figured I would give it a try and see what the fuss was about.

    After trying NixOS for just a few months on my work laptop, I was pretty much sold. Nix as a language, package repository, and (especially as a) community is far from perfect, but it manages to achieve something that no other Linux distribution can do: configuration.nix.

    I love that I can write the configuration for my entire system in one (pretty much fully declarative) configuration.nix. I used to have imperative Ansible playbooks miles long that have almost completely been replaced by configuration.nix. I don't know if NixOS is my end-game, but I