The Workstation

A computer tower. The case is made of black metal and plastic and has a glass side panel showing some of the internals, including a Cooler Master CPU fan and a GeForce RTX graphics card from MSI. On top of the tower, there is a Blu-ray Disc drive from LG labeled M-Disc. It faces to the side rather than the front. The tower sits on carpet with its back side facing a wall a few inches away. The side opposite the glass panel is a set of drawers. Some cables can be seen trailing behind the tower.

In 2022, I saved up enough to build my first personal desktop computer! Before the PC, I used a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. It consistently struggled to stay cool and had only 128 GB of storage. It was struggling to edit video and play games.

CPU Intel Core i7-13700K
Graphics Card MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti OC
RAM 64 GiB (gibibytes) of DDR4
Storage Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD

I use this machine to browse the web, do work, develop websites, produce 3D graphics, edit videos, and play games. It does everything very well and I don't think I'll have to upgrade it for a long time.

I got Blu-ray drive to rip the family collection of movies to digital files so that we can use them forever, regardless of the physical state of the discs or what's available to stream. Now it just kinda sits up there because there's not really a good place to put it. Maybe I'll get an enclosure someday.


Linux

My first personal computer was a MacBook and I used MacOS Catalina. After building a PC, I naturally installed Windows 10 on it, and shortly upgraded to Windows 11.

In my experience, Windows 11 was a significantly more irritating system to use than MacOS. I cleaned it up as best I could with some debloating scripts from GitHub (here is a great one) but it was kind of disappointing with its inconsistent dark mode and context menus and having to use a Microsoft account and unsync all my stuff from OneDrive.

In 2023, about 8 months after finishing the PC and installing Windows for the first time, I decided to try out Linux. I knew it was one of the big three desktop operating systems, but didn't really know anything about it. MacOS has Finder, Windows has File Explorer, but what about Linux? I had never even seen a screenshot of Linux before.

I found Linux Mint and installed it as a dual-boot, sort of going in with the mindset that it would be broken and old and I would have to go back to Windows. But it was surprisingly pleasant! I started to do almost everything in the Mint partition and eventually purged Windows.

After using Linux Mint for about two years, I decided I wanted to try out the KDE Plasma desktop environment. I tried Kubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE and eventually decided to use on KDE Linux because it's designed to be stable, has up-to-date software, and I love KDE. HOWEVER, although I love KDE Linux, it is currently in its alpha and the only available edition is the Testing Edition that uses potentially buggy developer builds of KDE software, so I would not recommend it for most users right now.

If you're interested in trying out Linux, maybe check out Linux Mint!

KDE's mascot Konqi welcomes you to the community!

Here is a video if you wanna learn more:

Click "YouTube" to load the video.

Laptops

In 2023, I got a new MacBook Pro from my parents for school. It has an M3 Pro SoC and 18 GB of RAM. MacOS is not the best thing in the world (particularly around user control) but it works great, has excellent battery life, and the screen resolution is sharp.

Linux doesn't work on it (though efforts exist) but I'd like to keep MacOS just in case Linux won't cut it for school.

Last year I also found a ThinkPad on Ebay for $40 and got it to try out various operating systems on it. I actually used it with Fedora KDE in one of my classes that needed software only compatible with Windows and Linux. The previous owner lost Ctrl and also somehow the trackpoint which is disappointing but not deal-breaking! It is otherwise is great condition.


Other Computer Stuff

On a desk is a small LCD display with two ovals representing eyes drawn on it. On top of it sits a black papercraft captain hat with a yellow skull symbol on it. There is an orange ribbon cable connected from the bottom of the display, and a game controller is plugged in a lit near the bottom of the frame.

This is a Raspberry Pi 4B. I used it to make a digital facemask for halloween one year where I dressed up as N from Murder Drones.

A Nintendo Switch tablet with connected green and pink Joy-Con controllers (left and right respectively). The screen shows a KDE Plasma desktop. An open window shows that the system is running Kubuntu 24.04.

This is my Nintendo Switch. It's an original model that allows the bootloader to be hijacked, so I'm running Kubuntu Linux on it.