I have a weird relationship with computers¹. I like using them, but I don't like programming them. I like playing games on them, but my definition of 'game' might be different from yours.

For a long time I would spend every nickel I had on the worst computer components I could find. Not because it was fun in operating a computer made from parts no 'real' enthusiast could consider using², but because I didn't have much money and I felt that I needed a computer that wasn't a Commodore 64. I installed every operating system I could find. Sometimes I dual-booted and spent lots of time learning why dual-booting is a bad idea. Sometimes I would spend a month or a summer with something that wasn't Windows just to see what it was like (it was fine). Sometimes Windows would take precedence because I was taking a class that required me to install Visual Studio³ for class work and installing that under anything but Windows wasn't happening.

In those days my computer almost never had the correct amount or correct type of screws in it, and I would constantly fiddle with something to make everything work. I would usually fiddle around too much and break a thing I couldn't fix and then I'd start over again.

Through all of it, I got to be very familiar with how much a computer can do without many resources. I could telnet to my local ISP and create HTML pages with pico, I could check my email with pine, I could browse the internet with lynx because it was faster to do those things directly on their server.

That's probably why, when broadband became available, I latched directly onto setting up a computer at home that I could remote into when I was out in the Real World™. Was it so I could have a persistent presence in irc channels? Was it so I could browse the internet without having my school or work know about what websites I was visiting? Was it because I spent a lot of time in the university's computer lab slacking off and wanted a way to work on something at home instead of the homework I was supposed to be doing? Would you believe that the answer to all of these questions (and more) is, 'yes'?

This isn't to say that I existed purely on the command line. I did sometimes, of course, but also sometimes my computer had a graphics card that could generate more than just text, so I'd install a mouse and point to things. Sometimes I'd even click them.

Scrounging for pennies to dump into marginal upgrades means that I spent a lot of time and what felt like a lot of money really thinking about how this stuff goes together and works or, usually doesn't work without some… encouragement. Starting my computing journey on a succession of low-resource computers formed a bedrock of a system of beliefs about how computers are and still influences how I use them⁴. Unfortunately, I forgot nearly all of that as soon as I graduated college.

I got a job in the Real World™ and I suddenly had Responsibilities. I had an adult-sized paycheck now, which meant I could buy better computer hardware, but I also had an adult-sized job schedule that didn't leave me the correct type of time that I could use to spend two days fixing a self-inflicted oopsie. I couldn't stay up until 4:00 AM rebuilding my web server again becuase PHP Nuke got pwned again. So, by the time Windows XP came around, most of my computing was done via Windows with a scrounged Linux laptop to the side. And every time there was another Windows release, Linux and Friends got pushed further and further into the periphery.

I still used Linux to run my website(s), but I barely paid attention to them. And by the time Windows 10 came along I didn't even have a functional laptop any more. I was all in on using Windows at home and at work. I wasn't just a Windows user, I was a Windows Insider™ and Linux was just that thing I played with on another computer for a few minutes in the evenings when I was very bored. I justified this in my head because my job was supporting Windows users, and the best way to learn about how Windows works is to use it a lot. Know thy enemy, etc.

I complained about the telemetry, but I accepted it. I complained about my computer rebooting itself overnight to install updates and losing the contents of unsaved files, but I accepted it. I complained about losing the ability to customize my interface, but I accepted it. 'Complaining' isn't even the right word. I was mildly annoyed and grumbled silently to no one⁵.

Eventually, I was doing some housekeeping and removed the trial versions of Outlook and Word that were included with Windows somehow, installed some updates, rebooted my computer (because I didn't want it to reboot on its own in the middle of the night again), and Outlook and Word, the two programs I had just uninstalled were back. That's the first time I can remember actually being livid at Microsoft. This is my computer. Nobody gets to decide what gets installed on it but me. I suddenly had clarity. I immediately went to the store, bought some new hard drives that I couldn't really afford, came home, and installed Ubuntu Linux⁶. In that moment, I decided that Windows will never be my primary operating system again.

I spent a couple of years distrohopping and remembering myself. I tried several Linux distributions, I tried several BSDs. I tried existing with just a laptop and a dock. I tried setting up a NAS and keeping all my documents on NFS shares. I went wild.

One of the reasons I jumped around so much was because I was trying to recreate my Windows experience. I had drifted so far from doing the things on the computer I really liked, i.e. learning how to use simple command-line stuff to do actual computer tasks like manipulating text, making silly HTML files to share with friends, and also checking email, chatting, etc. All I was doing was spending all my computer time browsing social media and browsing Steam to buy games I would never play, then wondering why I didn't seem to have time to do anything else.

One of the first things I would do when I installed a new OS was to try and get Steam working⁷. On Linux, this is actually not too bad⁸. I have some other games that exist outside of Steam, so I tried lots of things to try and get them working. I tried Wine. I tried Crossover. I tried installing a VM and passing through a video card. These solutions all can work, but most of them are pretty brittle and broke all the time for me. They required constant babysitting that I just got tired of doing. Especially since I wasn't playing any of them. I was just installing them as a hobby.

Eventually I decided to eschew modern Windows games on my 'main' computer entirely. I removed Wine from my computer, declined to re-up my Crossover subscription, and bought a mid-range Windows 'gaming' laptop for playing Windows games and treat it as another game console.

It doesn't sound like it would be very dramatic (and it wasn't!), but once I removed the gacha game disguised as a video game store from my daily life I started to actually look around my computer more. I started to investigate and found that there were plenty of games I'd been ignoring forever. Good ones, even. There are also things like SCUMMVM, DOSBox, and a slew of emulators (for emulating games that I've legally acquired, of course)⁹.

There are also lots of programs with funny names that I've always seen, but never investigated. I probably should have learned what they do and how they work ages ago, but I'm doing that now. I'm taking my time, reading man pages, reading technical books, and learning how to do things manually. I'm reorienting myself with my internalized idea of what it means to use a computer. And I'm having fun.

It's also pretty amazing to think about how capable computers are and have been for the last 20 years once you strip away a few (or a lot) of the layers that have been placed between you and the hardware sitting on your desk or your lap. Once you do that and start adding what you want and not what some vendor somewhere unilaterally decided you will have, you might be surprised at what you can do.¹⁰

The MNT Reform hit 'Hacker' ''News'' the other day, and almost immediately there were people asking unanswerable questions: Why does this exist when old, used ThinkPads are cheaper? Why does this exist when Framework laptops have faster CPUs and more RAM? and so on. I also found a review on ars technica where the reviewer complains for several paragraphs that Electron apps and 'heavier' web pages are slow on the Reform, and that performance is bad when you try to use it to run the same apps as you do on a full-fat computer. Of course it is. How are these even questions?

I'm not just picking on ars here. There are YouTube channels where they view every piece of hardware through the 'how well does it play games' lens, which feels like they don't know what they're doing. I understand that you have to give your audience what they want, but what value is there in trying to play action games on an e-ink monitor? Or playing a YouTube video on an e-ink e-reader and then being surprised that it looks bad and sounds bad? Of course it does.

It's really easy for me to look at these things, shake my head, and think to myself that these reviewers and journalists just don't get it. But, for a long time, I couldn't articulate what the 'it' is that they don't get. Because, to me, the 'it' is as self evident as it could possibly be. It's so self-evident that I had a hard time even believing that anyone couldn't get it.

I think I understand that now.

I think that what they don't have is my life experience and the values I constructed along the way. Someone born in 2006 and is 20 years old now has probably never used a computer close to the metal and they don't understand why anyone would. They may not know that it's even possible to exist below the layers of abstractions between them and their computer's resources. Or maybe they do know, but they think only weirdos care about that kind of stuff¹¹. Maybe they're content to exist in a world where the word 'computer' is so divorced from the concept of computing that it is just another appliance that they have to drop a kilodollar every few years to keep playing Call of Duty or scroll facebook.

I won't shame anyone for doing that, and I realize that there are more people out there that view computers as appliances than they do general computing devices. Maybe this is just me internalizing it for the first time a few decades later than I should have. I groaned when Apple aired a commercial that had a child ask 'What's a computer?' when a clueless adult called an iPad a computer. But it did make me realize how much effort Apple and Microsoft and Red Hat are putting into abstracting away the parts of a computer that make a computer a computer. All of those abstractions eat up so much of the advancements that have been made in computing over the last few decades that reading a paragraph of text and looking at a couple of accompanying JPGs feels slower today than it did 30 years ago with a computer that was 97% slower than the computer I'm using to type this.

That bothers me.

It probably sounds like I'm bothered because computing is being made more accessible to people who don't want to learn how to program or use the command line or, y'know, nerd stuff. While I do think those are important skills to have, making computing more accessible to non-techies doesn't bother me. It also might sound like I'm against making computers more and more powerful. That doesn't bother me, either¹².

What bothers me is that what I consider to be normal computer use is now the weird outlier. What bothers me more is that what passes for computer enthusiasm now ignores most of the things that got me interested in computing in the first place. The people who do care about the same things I do are sequestered into smaller and smaller spaces.

I think that's the reason that I stopped having fun with computers for a while. I kept up with the mainstream computer enthusiast scene because I felt like that was what computer enthusiasts did. Even though it was boring inauthentic. I allowed myself to believe that I wasn't the kind of person that I turned out to be.

Now, I'm fixing that.

This article was posted on 25 Apr 2026 and I haven't looked at it since.