Well, the whiplash is palpable.

Welcome back, friend.

I know, I know, it's been a while.

For those of you who were wondering from the last blogpost; all of the upgrades for the Dell Precision workstation happened and it has been the most rock solid workstation I've had in a long time.

That being said, I want to redirect the attention to my main rig. Obligatory fetch below:



That's right, you thought I was fucking with you last time, I DO use GNOME!

It's okay, if you wanna click away from the screen, I totally understand. Have a good one.

For those of you who are still interested, boy do I have some words to say..erm, type.
I take a great deal of pleasure in tinkering with my main rig, which, in its current form is going on 5 years old.
Originally known as Ventus, The Obelisk is the current version of my computer; all of that hardware is stuffed into a Fractal Design POP XL Silent non-TG version.

It's silent, it's big, it has all of the I/O I could ever need, and it's had more OSes installed on it than most people try in their lifetime.
To properly give you a backstory for this, we'll have to revisit High School Zed.

So, in high school, my main computer was an old laptop, a Toshiba Satellite that ultimately bit the dust and needed to be replaced.
Eventually I was able to afford, for $50, an HP Mini 1000 Netbook.
As you can imagine, this thing, with its dinky li'l Intel Atom processor wasn't capable of much, and we were really getting into the Windows 7 era about that time (imagine 2009-2010).
This netbook was NOT cut out for this era of computing and was certainly not a great time in Windows.
My mother, at the time, had a coworker named Chris--whom I very vividly remember showing me Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on an old Dell Dimension tower from the 90s, and running like an absolute champ. Needless to say, I was hooked.
Chris had invited me to a local Linux User Group (LUG), to which I accepted.
I brought my little HP Mini 1000, and sat down with Chris--being introduced to the group as "my coworker's kid, he's interested in Linux!"
Save for the "ONE OF US" chants, I was widely accepted with open arms. Users from this group gave me many copies of Ubuntu, including 8.04 Netbook Remix!

I've got very few pictures from this time, but I do have a couple of screenshots (only one of which I can share for the purposes of privacy):



Anyhow, time went on and ultimately, I moved away from Linux, largely at the fault of changes in Ubuntu and the adoption of GNOME 3.

It's okay if you threw up in your mouth a little.

I went, begrudgingly back to Windows XP until I replaced the laptop.

All the while, my best friend, Randall, and his family were primarly Ubuntu/Linux users--and I thought the world of Randall.
If he was using Ubuntu, so should I! He's the coolest!
For the record, I thought Randall was the coolest motherfucker around. Because he was.

It wasn't until much later I started to regain interest in it; and ultimately reinvigorated my love for FOSS projects.
Fast forward to today: I've used every major distro that exists and as much as I've tried to get away from it for the memes; I use Arch, btw.

"But ZED!", I hear you screaming. "YOU'RE USING ENDEAVOUR, NOT ARCH!"

My only retort is that you should shut the entire fuck up and let me live and enjoy my computer. :)

At any rate; I've built out my system how I really like it and just wanted to talk about it for a bit.