But as I grew older, Windows after 7 kept getting worse and worse, not to mention that Internet Explorer was a dinosaur that was holding the internet back. Google Chrome was like manna from heaven - a browser that actually had tab processing, where only a single tab was killed if there was crashing instead of killing the entire browser. I first installed Chrome in 2011, and never looked back. It's only now that I realized the power of Chromium embeddability with progressive web apps - which aren't a gimmick but really powerful when you actually use them.
Windows was becoming bloated and a hog on resources, all just to be a wrapper for the Edge browser. When the Recall feature was announced, I had enough. I erased my Windows install and installed Linux Mint. Mint was a breath of fresh air - an operating system without the bloat of Windows; and then I tried other Linux distros - Fedora, Debian, Arch, and Gentoo. My most proud moment of computer labor was installing Arch from the command line using systemd-boot instead of GRUB - because systemd-boot requires one to be hands-on in writing the boot entries themselves, though it ends up neater. Gentoo was pretty fun as well, thanks to the Gentoo Handbook being the best installation manual for Linux, much better than even the ArchWiki, with Portage being in my opinion the best package manager on Linux. It's thanks to Linux that I switched from an iPhone to a Pixel Phone - the power of Android file management and the Linux kernel can never be underestimated.
But Desktop Linux still has flaws for my particular use-cases. Linux distros really want me to use Firefox, but Chromium browsers are on a whole superior technologically - with Firefox not even having progressive web apps until very recently,. Linux still sucks with 4K displays, with X11 not having fractional scaling and being a nightmare of code, and Wayland not yet having the necessary accessibility tools; and though I can use the command line, I still prefer GUIs and not having to get so verbose with my computer.
That's why I use ChromeOS for all my personal machines, where I have 2 ASUS Chromebox 5a's with an Intel® i7 cpu, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 256 GB M.2 PCIe G4x4 NVMe SSD. As well, I have a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 which has 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. ChromeOS is Linux and Unix-like, but made easy to use for me with my digital minimalism. I can download Android apps and use them on my computer. I can download Blogger as a PWA which leads to increased productivity. If ChromeOS and Android merge, then it would be even better, as Android apps being native would make ChromeOS superior to Windows, Mac, and every other Linux distro. As the M1 Macs have shown, ARM is the future of personal computing - and a ChromeOS with native android apps would be the perfect operating system for everything I could ever need.
