Here I'll post some of my progress turning myself into a Linux user.

I am staying on Windows 10 on my main machine for the purposes of university and playing Valorant, I'm most certainly a noob at this stuff.

In fact, my story of gaming and computers starts on the original XboX back in the day. I had an N64 I shared with my sister, but I personally only got into games onmy Xbox. I stayed loyal to the Xbox up until the Xbox One, which is when I began to lose interest. In high school I only ever had weak laptops and would play pirated versions of Minecraft or free-to-play games like Runescape and early War Thunder which weren't too demanding of the computers. But in the big pandemic I got back into PC gaming for real. I bought a used desktop and upgraded it along my journey. Started with a GeForce GT770 and now I have a GTX3060.

Now I'm feeling a pull to de-centralized and user-driven experience. Linux is sounding more and more appealing than selling my soul to big corpo tech. It's time we all learned some tech, I think. I wanna build SBCs and gaming devices, so I'm learning more and more, even just building this website has given me a lot more confidence in working the terminal in Linux

Images to peruse

The HP laptop I got when I was working as a teacher. I worked there for just under two years and had to torture myself through using this laptop as a tool for my students. It was abysmal. No surprise as it's running, what, 6gb or whatever of RAM, and less than 200gb of actual storage? With a little searching I found Ultramarine and gave it a go.

This HP was actually BIOS-locked because of the school's IT office services. So I was fairly certain that it wasn't going to simply install. This is where I was wrong, the HP Probook installed Linux with absolutely zero issues.

So now we have one laptop running Ultramarine, and the laptop on the left, my Acer Aspire from my last year of high school, we'll give it the Linux Mint treatment.

Fret not, Mint loyalists, this was also painless. However, my experience of Ultramarine on my HP was much smoother and nicer than how Linux Mint was feeling on the Acer, the Acer is technically a more powerful computer (running an entire 0.10gHz faster CPU clock-speed), and even has an Nvidia iGPU, but the slower HP (which to its credit is a much newer device) was somehow just feeling better.