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Over yesterday and today I've been applying updates to an old Windows 7 PC on which I run retro and arcade games. These days I use *nix on all my machines that aren't gaming PCs, but that setup is fairly recent for me. I didn't encounter an end-user PC running Linux until 2011, and I continued to use Windows 7 on my primary desktop all the way up to January 2020.
To be clear, I much prefer the power, extensibility, robustness, privacy, and utility of *nix to the slow, clunky, privacy-invasive slog of NT. What I can't deny, however, is the fondness with which I look back on Windows when I think about where my life was when I used it, and the place Windows had in my life at those times.
In particular, I ran Windows 7 on one machine or another from late 2009 to early 2020, the entirety of the OS's supported life. When I first started using it I had not yet graduated from high school, and when I stopped using it I was married and owned my own house. Of course eleven years of personal history also transpired in that time, from university to jobs to girlfriends to trips all over the country with family and friends.
I jumped on the smartphone wagon a little later than most of my friends, and much of my online communication with them took place on my desktop PC for most of the 2010s. Of course I also played PC games and used my computers as media centers, so much of my time at home was also spent in front of a keyboard. Thus my memories of those parts of my life are inextricably linked to my computers--and as a extension, Windows.
When Microsoft introduced Windows 10 in 2015, I tried it for a short time, then returned to Windows 7. I've stubbornly refused to "upgrade" to Windows 10 ever since, preferring to switch to Fedora when support for Windows 7 ended, and I'm quite happy in retrospect that I made that decision. Today I only run Windows 10 on one gaming PC, where it's necessary to play certain modern games, and I keep the OS locked down pretty tightly.
I do have some cherished memories with Linux, mainly involving an 2-in-1 laptop I bought for a programming class in 2016. I installed Linux Mint on it and made myself learn the fundamentals of Linux at the same time. I wonder what memories will come to be associated with my recent total switch to *nix.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]