THE THINGS I DO TO MY COMPUTERS
The older I've gotten, the less and less that Microsoft has served me (and I stopped being at all interested in Apple when I was in middle school). This is just gonna be a page about what I've done to get around all that nonsense.
Something about my css broke and idk what sobs so this'll just be in the ff theme for now
Laptop
A couple years ago, the laptop I got in 2017ish started to slow down. It would take about 5 min from hitting the power button to have Firefox up and running. I knew that Windows was pretty heavy, not to mention full of bloatware, so my brother helped me download Linux Mint (specifically the XFCE version, as it's the most lightweight).
As suggested by the name, my version of Mint runs XFCE desktop environment. I'm sure Cinnamon is much more fancy (I hear it has widgets) but my laptop probably wouldn't be able to handle it. Recently, it's been crashing a lot and occasionally the laptop stops registering that it has a keyboard. I'll probably have to replace this thing soon.
Tower PC
Earlier this year, I ran out of patience with Windows when they added Copilot to my PC automatically. There's a lot about Windows that I just didn't care for, and the constant advertising was so annoying. That ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back and that same weekend I backed up all my files and instead installed Pop!_OS.
Pop!_OS runs Gnome. It's very hard to get games running on my pc for some reason, even when ProtonDB says a game should work out of box.
My favorite Gnome extentions are Show Me The Text, the Emoji Selector, Espresso, and Lock Screen Message.
Both
There are a lot of things that I can use over both computers. Here's a list (honestly more for my own reference than anyone else's but feel free to poke through the list
Office: LibreOffice (office suite), Okular (iniversal document viewer), Koodo Reader (ebook reader), Foliate (ebook reader), Joplin (notetaking with markup, hostile to USB transfer), Notes (sticky notes), QOwnNotes (notetaking with markup, better for USB transfer), Xpad (also sticky notes, but better this time)
Music: RhythymBox (annoying), Audacious (with an Aerith or Mass Effect skin), Strawberry (also annoying)
Firefox extentions: Highlight, YouTube Search Fixer, Firefox Multiple Containers, and Indie Wiki Buddy, which I found out about through BreezeWiki. Breezewiki was an extention that removes the bloat from fandom wikis.
Customizations Shina-Fox, which removes the tab bar at the top of the browser and moves it to one side. It also changes the colors of your browswer depending on what theme you're using - getting the theme you want is a little annoying, but satisfying when you get it right. Tabliss, which allows you to change what your browser's new tab page looks like.
My pc has fanart as my new tab page image, otherwise I would share it. I don't remember what my laptop has; next time I check I'll update this page. I ended up really liking Shina-Fox, especially with my laptop. It's old and the screen is a little small, so being able to avoid the tab bar gives me far more room to work with.
The quote is from Sonnet 30 by Edmund Spencer.
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind."
The quote is from Ode to a Yellow Onion by C. Dale Young
Beyond the village, within a cloud
of wild cacao and tamarind,
they chant your tale, how you,
most common of your kind,
make the great warrior-men cry
but a woman can unravel you.
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