@SwiftOnSecurity I can be your friend. I'll listen to your shameful secrets without judgment or telling anyone. I'll cheer at your victories and listen to Taylor Swift with you.

You'll come to trust and rely on me, but when you least expect it, I'll slap on a grey beard and talk to you about how I've configured my Linux.

It may be a price too high to pay.

But seriously though, before this I had no idea what I want to do with my life. There are people there who could get into programming/IT if they just got half the chance and the right motivation. Our obsolete devices could be the future career of a some gamer kid who never knew how much they wanted a shitty laptop.

The more I learned, the more I also realized how awful the software we use is. It gave me both a target and outlet for my strong sense of ethics.

Using any GUI software was so slow that I had to learn to do everything with a CLI or TUI. Except I got used to it and still use my significantly more powerful laptop (still a Dell Latitude!) the same way. I got quite good at configuring things, and took an interest in privacy and cybersecurity. I smoothly transitioned from "grumpy script-blocking Windows user" to "Linux-using privacy advocate".

I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to spoil your kids, give them shitty computers.

I had basically no Linux experience before this. I distro-hopped through Ubuntu derivatives branded as "lightweight", but was frustrated by not knowing how they were configured and what is taking up resources. A week later I ended up with a distro that you install from the command line, notorious for the obnoxiousness of its users.

I tried a lot of things to make it faster, from compiling my kernel and web browser. Compiling took forever and had little impact.

https://xkcd.com/456/