More soul searching

Chat about Zorin
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You folks have been diligent and very patient with an old dog trying to learn new tricks ... but I have come to the realization that this old dog needs to stay on the porch instead of tying to catch cars with the younger dogs .... at my age 76 I can't remember things very well .... I can remember what happened 10-20-30 years ago but not what happened yesterday ....

So with that realization I have decided to return to Gnome instead of trying to do all this customization ... coding and other type stuff .... I know Gnome is kinda buggy but I seem to be causing my own bugs and screw-ups in XFCE so I feel it is better for me to use a system that is easier for me to remember and navigate ....

Now I am not having a pity party and I do not want any "oh you can do it" type of replies .... in fact I really don't want any replies at all ... I am doing what I thing is best and that is using the old KISS principal .... and for those that don't know that is Keep It Simple Stupid ... learned that during my management courses years ago and it held true then and holds true today ....

I am not going back to Windoze as I spent hours yesterday moving more folders to Zorin and other than when I got in trouble and had to use my net connection in Win to contact the board I have not gone back to Win and don't intend to ....

I like this board and all the members who have pitched in to help me with my adventure and I know I will call on you in the future when I need help ...

Again thank you for all your support and help especially to Aravisian who had to spoon feed me most of the way .... he spent many many hours when I messed things up helping me to get straightened back out only for me to do it again .... but knowing me I will be asking for help again but maybe not so often .... LOL

So please do not reply to any of this I am only writing this so you know what is going on and that I will be on Gnome trying to behave myself .... again THANKS

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Too bad, old man.

When I first started out, all I ever did was make a mess of the Zorin Build.
I know with certainty and without exaggeration that I ultimately reinstalled Zorin OS over twenty times... And it is not because Zorin OS is hard to use. It is that my head is hard to use.
If you think age brings memory loss-- Talk to a teenager sometime.

Do what is right for you. If Gnome works, use that. But do not beat yourself up, either. If you think I have been patient... You should have seen Swarfendor and Zorinantwerp trying to deal with me when I first migrated to Zorin from Windows...

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I don't do that .... it ain't in my nature .... but I am a realist and lost my rose colored glasses years ago .... LOL

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Forgot where you put 'em, did ya?

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Yea ... I had slipped them in my back pocket and accidentally sat on them and being a "kuripot" (tight wad) I couldn't afford to buy another pair .... LOL

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Ya, I have the oppisette problem that you do Frog. I have strong self-hate for myself, but I love others, well, most of the time lol. And yep, were all getting older, every day. And I hear ya, my eyes can't see for garbage.

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First week on Linux (I'm about to enter the second week) I destroy different distro (MX, AntiX, Mint) and almost to destroy my laptop cause I already in the point that I can't install any of the OS I created in bootable usb :laughing: except for Zorin OS.

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Kuripot... hahahahahah

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Just like my life lol

I can't tell you how many computers I messed up until I started picking up on the training. Its always harder to learn when your just beginning to learn the basics as a kid in life lol.

But nothing is worse when you mess up your computer cause you weren't being careful on what sites you were on, and you get nailed by a boot sector virus. Happened to be in the 2000's when I was still on Windows.

Once you get a boot sector virus, the hard drive is done, just so you know. Once your boot loader is fried, no anti-virus program is gonna remove that virus and repair the damage. Best you have to do, is just buy a new hard drive.

Your getting quite the education Rui, hopefully while your having fun destroying your computer, your at least doing it with feness. OK, will you please stop destroying your computer? Love your computer, what did it do to you? lol Alright alright, I wish you much success. Lord knows that I love having you around, you are great to have around here.

Startreker

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I love my laptop so much. That's why I want the best for it. So happen its hard to find. hahahaha. I encounter before a virus that is hard to understand. Its controlling my laptop (former laptop) and the reason why its hard to understand is because its in chinese. Hahahaha. Its funny experience for me. I just downloaded my favorite movie and experience that. From then on never downloaded from sites that I have a doubt. Of course I've been able to stop that virus without reformatting but quite a task. Racing against the virus.

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If you didn’t want any replies, you should not have posted. Ha!

But don’t worry, I’m not going to say the usual stuff. This is an opportunity for one of my deeply philosophical answers. :slight_smile:

I am 50 now and still believe that the year 2000 is the future. But this is not simply about getting older. Something else has happened.

When I started programming, there were about 50-60 different commands or keywords I could use, and that was it. My mind could easily understand and hold all these, allowing me to re-combine them to create programs. I didn’t have to worry about configuring the environment, whether it be the desktop, IDE or project or frameworks.

In my case, I use computer to create things – and that means programming. I love creating things, but believe there is an optimum balance to be had between restriction and “freedom” in your domain, whether that be the programming tools or artistic tools you use. If your domain has too many degrees of freedom, it becomes harder and harder to genuinely create anything worthwhile, and things become pointless.

Actually, this reminds me of “MS Paint” which is very restrictive and many people actually chose to use it precisely for that reason. It’s restrictive nature imposes a certain style which would not be possible otherwise (below).

I’m currently running Gnome, although I have a love-hate relationship with it. Ultimately, I prefer the relatively few (in comparison to KDE) configuration options. While I put a little effort into making my environment my own, ultimately it is not what I want to spend my time doing. I just want it to work, and realise that if I’m going to use it, I must be prepared to adapt rather than simply demand options that allow my work the way I am used to. On the other hand, I don’t want lot of options – until I do. Then I demand that someone put one in for me. :slight_smile:

But more philosophically and generally, computers used to be fun because they were optimal for creation of things which were elegant and in their own way beautiful. While there were once 50-60 commands (degrees of freedom), there are effectively now millions and millions. I lament on this, and it is not simply about getting old.

Were once I could start programming and fire away in a frenzy of creative endeavour, today all I seem to do is manage bloody frameworks. It feels more like a technical exercise in bureaucracy rather than creativity. Were once I knew all the tools, all I do is bring in and re-combine monstrous frameworks. I can no longer write anything without being online to find examples and references. I cannot write C++, for example, without ending up 15 angle brackets deep in the bureaucracy of the Standard Template Library.

If only we could return to relay computers and punch cards, or at least black and white terminals running ANSI BASIC, then life would be so much better. If only people like me didn’t write all this new stuff.

It’s not that change is bad and my attitude has always been one to embrace it. However, there is a limit. It’s the rate of change which is the problem, and has been for sometime. Not directly relevant, but in a broader sense it is, but Alvin Tofler wrote about it in 70s in Future Shock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU

But to summarise, and to bring myself back – I’m with you brother! And don’t worry about the age thing, it’s not just that.

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I wish I become a real programmer too but that didn't happen because of some circumstances. hahahahah

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I agree with you .... when I first got into computers many more years ago than I wish to remember I had a little Radio Shack Tandy EX machine .... no hard drives ... one 5 1/4 floppy dive (later added an external 3.5 disk) and a built in B&W monitor .... I thought I was the cat's meow ... as a maintenance supervisor took it to work and made work schedules and routines and was the envy of the facility ...

Anyway to make a long story short I bought a book on programming ... I believe it was Basic but not sure .... well I was going to be the world's next Billy Boy Gates (heaven forbid) .... so my first project was to make a wine glass with bubbles coming out of it .... so I wrote and rewrote over and over again and 3 weeks later I had success .... I was so proud I was going to save my work and print it out .... BUT .... I managed to delete it somehow and gave up in despair never to try my hand at programming again .... and my dreams of grandeur and fame & fortune were dashed .... LOL

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I don't think its the same machine, but close enough!

Tandy computers, while popular back in the day for their low cost, they were nowhere near as good as IBM machines. And with MAC beginning to dominate the market, it pretty much buried Commodore and Tandy.

Oh no, that makes me so sad :cry:

I know what that feels like though, you put so much work into something, then you lose it all, and then your like screw it. In providing support to people on here, that has happened to me before.

Its a lot of work writing up a guide, on the fly, and including screenshots, for every single user who posts a question. This is how I get burned out on that sort of thing. Just too much.

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No that Tandy 1000 was a Mercedes while my EX was a Volkswagen .... LOL .... here are some pictures .... and I was wrong it did have a separate monitor .... the floppy drive was on the right hand side of the machine ....

Tandy EX computer
Tandy EX computer618Ă—750 122 KB

tandy_1000ex_1s

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WOW, thats like the Apple II computers! They looked the same way! Except that Apple II computers had GREEN colored monitor screens. Nobody believe in color back in the 80's, life was monochrome for folks back then. Color really didn't make a serious thing until the 90's on computers lol.

Who could afford a Mercedes but only the rich? Same goes for those fancy Lexus and Tesla's and BMW's lol. Yes, at least Volkswagon was affordable. Arn't they still making cars today?

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Never know they even exist. Damn. hahahahahah

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Yea .... Tandy was one of the first producers of home computers and they followed after IBM in the professional market .... but in the home market side ....at one time Tandy was the 4th largest producer of home computers .... middle 70's or early 80's ...

I bought mine with the tax return check one Christmas in the early 70's as they went on sale .... and never looked back and I have always had a computer since then .... mostly desk tops until I bought my first laptop (a refurbished one) for my work as a engineering purchasing agent .... but I still had a desktop at home ....

After I retired and moved to the country I now live in I built my one and only gaming desktop which I designed and built myself from the ground up .... only to find that 2 years later it was now technically obsolete .... so I bought a series of Acer laptops and finally my Asus .... which I love and will probably be my last unless I blow it up some how .... god forbid ... LOL

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I used to have fun building desktops. I've built a 486, a PIII, P4, and AMD 64 single core desktops. When 2012 came around, the gaming scene was already changing in regards to prices. I did not have 3K to dump into a new desktop machine build then, so I bought the Acer V3-771G notebook on sale for 879 at Newegg.

That Acer was already a mid-range machine at the time I bought it, it was technically outdated after the 5-year mark. But having no money makes a person not be able to buy another machine. So I kept using that machine for a total of 9-years! Of course it couldn't play any new games at all, not with an Nvidia 640M in it!

When it came time to buy a new computer, I did check into possibly building my a new desktop build since my last in 2005. But the costs were worse this time, since we were in a tech shortage, even if I could get the video card I wanted, it would cost me 5 grand possibly for a high end gaming desktop build.

Obviously I wasn't going to go that rout. So just as I bought a notebook in 2012, I bought another this year. Difference is you ask? I didn't buy a mid-range machine this time. I bought a high end machine, the kind of machine that can easily have a 10 year lifespan.

I made sure to pick the version of my computer that had 16GB of VRAM, it cost 200 dollars more, but thats called future proofing baby.
https://forum.zorin.com/t/my-new-computer-msi-ge76-raider-i7-10870h-8-core-16-thread-32gb-ram-nvidia-3080-gpu-16gb-vram-1tb-nvme-ssd/3827?u=startreker

So ya, building computer's is fun and all, but these days during a tech shortage its impossible. The choice is clear, you can spend 2K less and get a notebook, or spend 2K more to get a desktop version. Frankly, desktops are kind of falling out of favor in the home market anyways.

Just so you know, more people own notebooks then desktops these days.

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I only knew IBM... Hmmm should I sue our school for not teaching the right one? haahaahhahaah

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