every one of my operating systems is a chapter, and this is the machine story that ran underneath all the language work. it starts where most do, and ends somewhere i'd never have guessed
windows xp, the first
my first computer was windows xp. plain, familiar, everyone had one. i used it like a user โ no reason to look deeper, no sense yet that there was anything underneath
the power user years
high school changed that. i loaded 0phcrack into a windows machine with no bios protection and pulled the school's administrative password. that's the honest story, and i lost interest in hacking right after it โ the curiosity was about what was under the hood, not about breaking in. what stuck was real: i learned everything about booting systems from external media. that's the trick that unlocked the rest
around the same time i tried linux mint and ubuntu. other systems, other boots. the seed was planted even if i didn't stay
windows, mostly
for the majority of the years after, i stuck with windows. a couple of years, 2012 to 2014, i tried a few linux flavors and switched back. windows was home base โ not because it was best, but because it was known
the return: manjaro
then 2024. i picked rust back up, and i made a change with it: i moved to manjaro linux. it's still my favorite flavor of user-friendly arch. manjaro is arch, and arch is the whole point โ the rolling, always-up-to-date release system. no more big version jumps, no more waiting. the system just keeps moving, the way the work did
down the stack
from manjaro i went deeper. manjaro to hyprland to dwm. each step a layer of the desktop peeled back, until what was left was the window manager itself โ the bare tiles, the keyboard, nothing between me and the machine. and now the cli agent helpers sit on top of that and pick up the slack, so i can do pretty much whatever i want
the stack, plainly
since we're all nerds here, the current setup, for the record:
- arch โ the rolling release underneath, always up to date
- dwm โ the tiling window manager, bare tiles and keyboard
- dmenu โ the launcher, type what you want, hit enter
- alacritty โ the terminal, fast and minimal
- chrome โ the browser
that's it. five pieces, pretty straightforward. no big rice, no dozens of dots โ just enough, and every layer mine
ๆบ is machine. from xp as a user to arch and dwm as whatever i am now โ a long road, told in the systems i kept and the ones i shed