I successfully installed Mandrake, my first GNU/Linux distribution, dual-booting it with Windows-95, in the late 1990s. I have been dual-booting various GNU/Linux distributions with various Windows versions ever since.

Currently, I’m dual-booting Windows 11 with Garuda-KDE-Lite, using the rEFInd boot manager. I use sbctl to sign the necessary files, so I can enable secure boot on my computers. While I know secure boot isn’t regarded as necessary for GNU/Linux installations, it is for Windows 11, and sbctl makes it easy to do, without having to manually sign new kernels with each upgrade (sbctl adds a build hook to handle it). I found instructions on the CachyOS Wiki for anyone interested.

I’m an experimenter, and the thing I like best about GNU/Linux is that I can always find something new to experiment with (I call these experiments Adventures), and most of what I learn gets implemented into whatever GNU/Linux distribution I’m using at the time.

Not only that, but I’m a senior citizen, in my mid-70s, and I’ve been assembling/building computers most of my adult life. It all started when the hard drive of our (my wife, and I) first IBM-compatible PC (circa early 1990s) suffered a head crash, and I learned that the MFM technology was no longer in use, so I could not replace the drive. As a result, I set out to learn how to assemble my own devices, and I’ve never purchased a ready-built desktop computer since. As for laptops, I always try to get the best I can afford, so it lasts as long as possible.

Well, that about some me up,