My name is Fredrik. My website is fmx.sh, and my GitHub is github.com/fmxsh, but there's not much there at the moment.

------ Chronology of Systems ------

NES

Either you had Nintendo or Sega. Zelda 1 and SMB 1 were my first exposure to games.

Amiga 500 and Workbench

On my birthday, I was bought a used Amiga 500 with 350 floppies, an extra floppy drive, and 1MB of extra memory. Used XCopy with friends. Crystal intros were among the favorites.

SNES

Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 were never released in Europe. I had to buy an adapter and order from the Imported from the USA section in a game magazine.

Windows 95

Explored everything from Turbo C++ to SoftICE and games. Compiling my first C program gave me an incredible sense of creative freedom.

Slackware

First exposure to Linux. Blackbox VM. Even got my 56k modem working (with PPP something). Programmed a MUD server and reached 2% of my goal. Used Pico editor, which wasn’t that great of an IDE. Also tried Red Hat. Later reverted to Windows.

PlayStation and N64

When Final Fantasy 7 arrived at the post office, I was shaking with excitement. Pre-ordered the USA release, running on a modified PAL console (the retailer offered modding). A guy at the local game store actually completed Final Fantasy 7 in the store. He was there almost every day playing. He used to stand on one leg and switch legs. The store let him have his own memory card.

Windows 98

A time of CD-ROMs and MP3s. Making maps in Quake and attending a few LAN parties. Never really liked the social aspect of it—more fun with close friends. Carrying my computer to my neighbor’s house to play Quake in multiplayer over a null modem cable. Also wiped a friend’s hard drive by mistake when convincing and assisting him to install Linux because it’s cool. The intended dual boot obviously failed. He had to learn to deal with loss, which is a very beneficial skill to have.

Windows ME

I actually ran that for a short period. The big thing was that the Start menu would fade in when opening it. I had never seen anything like that before in an OS. Probably too heavy of a rendering load for previous versions.

Windows XP

The dawn of broadband for me. Began exploring PHP. Had some really good success with web projects.

Gentoo

Got it working, including general stuff like sound. Later used LFS too. Used Linux for some time—mostly a window-centered environment. Switched back to Windows, mainly for games, Photoshop, and convenience.

Windows 7

Other things in life… not much computer engagement.

Windows 10

The death of creativity and engagement. (What happened here? Aging? Aging = decline, unless you stay active and challenged.)

Windows 11

I absolutely refuse!

Arch Linux

I’m alive again. I’ll never return to Windows. I got my enthusiasm back. Why didn’t I do this from the start? Fan of a basic window manager and a heavily terminal-centered environment. I like to explore and configure it, as well as run servers. System administration and programming. Love Neovim.

ChatGPT and similar

To be honest, it blows all quirks of Linux (as with any other system) out of the picture by solving them quickly and making it way easier to learn and understand the core of Linux, enabling the realization of its power—and why things that seem odd actually unleash the most power.

I’ve started to love the fact that Linux is not user-friendly because I like the challenge (as long as it’s not non-logical exceptions and quirky syntax taking hours to solve… but thanks to AI, those things don’t stand in the way).

However, Windows nowadays actually requires more time to solve basic things than the value it returns. For example: try disabling the requirement of signing in with a remote account just to use the computer.

Also

NES, SNES, PS1, N64, PS2, and now most recently PS4, but only the most casual play of simple games.