The digital minimalist is made, not born
This is going to be a tangent about my evolving relationship with technology... Sort of... just stick with me here.
I grew up without a computer. Which isn't too odd until you realize I was born in 2005. My childhood years were when computers really were blowing up for home use. Even in the developing country I was in, it was pretty rare to find a house without at least one dedicated computer system.
I was, however, given a phone at a very young age. I was just five years old when I got a qwerty keyboard blackberry phone; the reason being that my parents were out a lot and I needed a way to call them if something happened. This was also the era in which landlines were completely fading out of common use. I actually had never seen a landline being used outside an office setting.
Back then phones weren't... advanced... and it especially was boring for a kid that had no use to text or email anyone. Fast forward a couple of years though and smart phones were being adopted at a phenomenal pace. My mother got a pretty decent Samsung phone when I was around 8 years old, and that's when I really got into technology.
My 10th birthday I got my first personal smart phone. It was nothing fancy; a budget Samsung that could run most mobile games at the time. However, it was slow enough that I was looking for solutions to make it faster and hold more battery life. We didn't have Wi-Fi in our house till Covid, so back then I relied on hotspot and a small mobile data package my mother took every month.
Within all the limitations I had, I was able to learn how to root my phone, which, for a child, didn't really unlock much potential? But hey I managed to do it without bricking my phone which was a real achievement for a 10yo. I also had learned how to side-load apps, and use third-party apps to crack most mobile games.
Fast forward to Covid; when we got our first ever PC system as well as a constant Wi-Fi connection. I say a PC system, but it was really just a ground potato plugged up to a 4:3 monitor held together by duct-tape. The system did not have any graphics, and it had 2GB of RAM making it unable to run even basic games. It had 8GB of storage meaning I had to be extremely picky when it came to programs I could install.
Despite all this my first instinct on the PC was to learn how to code. I looked up some python tutorials and began going at it for a week or two... until the system finally headed the reapers call and decided to one day just not turn on.
It wouldn't be until 3 years later that I got another computer system, which is the laptop I'm currently using. Between that potato and this pretty decent system, I had been constantly learning of ways to make system more efficient.
It was through that research that I fell into the rabbit hole of digital minimalism. I had completely de-bloated my android phone and as soon as I got my laptop, I de-bloated windows on it as well. Despite this windows kept fighting back; introducing things like the co-pilot, and kept reinstalling one drive and office with every update.
Because of all of this I started to look for an alternative... that being switching to Linux. This really was the end of the beginning for me (Is that even a real expression?). It led me into a far deeper rabbit hole and now I feel like a mad man when talking to my friends. But at the same time I feel like a child that barely got out the womb when I browse through online forums.
I'll talk more about Linux journey in another post. For now uhh... Man I'm always quite bad at ending these things... uhhh... Hope you have a great rest of your day (or night)... -Cakes <3