Change: It was hard.

Macintosh IIci Owner's Guide, p. 82

I've been using Macintosh just about my whole life. Our family purchased a Macintosh IIci sometime in 1989. It was secondhand from my grandmother, a hilarious woman who meant well, but was talked into buying an $8,000 computer system. Large corporations wouldn't have invested in such power at the time, but here we were with this machine that could fly circles around the globe compared to my friends' IBMs. My dad was a designer, though before the entire industry digitized itself, he saw the majesty of such potential at his own company. Why contract out design work when it could be accomplished on a IIci with Adobe Illustrator in-house? His proposal to get these machines fell on deaf ears. Nevertheless, our family remained loyal to the Apple line, following with a Power Macintosh 7200, and ending with my iMac G3.

While in college in the early 2000s, I experimented with Mac OS X, though my iMac still seemed to prefer for Mac OS 9. It was only 700 MHz in the first place. Why would Apple think the Mac OS X compositing window manager would run tolerably in such tight quarters? As such, I remained with System 9 until quite recently, when the iMac's CD drive failed. It had been replaced once before, along with the speakers, the hard drive, the keyboard—I kept the magic alive. At this point, I'd had enough of disassembling the insane polycarbonate puzzle that concealed the iMac's guts. The 1990s Macintosh vs. Intel war finally ended in my mind... I was ready to jump to the "new" world.

New for me meant switching to a more open-source world. More of a "Woz" world, and less of the appliance-y "Jobs" world. Particularly, it would be a world that did not involve the obligation to protect oneself from viruses. I had seen my father struggle with antivirus software when he made the switch to Windows in the year 2000. No, if I was going to make the jump to an Intel machine, I would use Linux.

Linux in the '90s was a scary proposition, especially if you were a "dumb" Mac user. I had no real programming experience, and my only exposure to a text command terminal was from the Apple IIe I had bought at a garage sale in 1998. At the recommendation of my brother who lives in Linuxland, I should begin with Ubuntu, which I think means "Linux for dumb-butts."

But what to put it on?

My dad had long-since abandoned his Dell OptiPlex in the closet for a doped-out 64-bit system he built himself. Seeing as the Dell was trash, starting in 2010, it would be my new Linux baby.

For about three years, I used Ubuntu "Lucid Lynx." Ubuntu delights in code-naming its operating systems with alliterative animal names. (See what I did there?) I delighted in the user experience under the GNOME 2 desktop environment. What had always been a pox on Linux users, the drivers, were now only mildly unpleasant to configure. Of course, we Macintosh users never really had to worry about drivers because the hardware was all mostly standardized. Oh, so much to learn!

Unity: Fatty fatty 2 by 4, can't get through the kitchen door!

 Then the Unity and GNOME 3 environments came out. What I didn't know at the time was that GNOME, the go-to desktop environment for many Linux distributions employs what's called a "compositing window manager." This makes your windows all glassy and see-through which is fine on machines that have the resources to support such a light show. I don't have one.

Dell OptiPlex GX400—the glowing phosphors

My Dell uses an Intel Pentium 4 chip, and at 1.3 GHz, it's still faster than most netbooks out there today. Not bad for a machine built in the year 2000. Still, I'm leaving Ubuntu for a new operating system (and window manager) that's not such a pig. Here is what I learned: