tulip's study

my computer collection

thought it'd be fun to talk about my current collection of computers! i love all of them very much.

main desktop PC

my first ever PC build, built in 2021. assembling my own PC was something i'd wanted to do for a very long time, and i waited a long time for the right opportunity and excuse to do it. my late 2013 MacBook Pro was finally begging for retirement after years of faithful service, so i started gathering parts on my limited budget.

GPU prices were REALLY bad at this time... a lot of people told me to just wait a year for them to come down, but i needed a computer pretty urgently. the 1050 Ti was a very generous hand-me-down that i got for free from my sibling. i don't really play games often or work with 3D/video much, so it's been completely fine. i still see no personal reason to upgrade anytime soon.

i ran Windows 10 on it for about 3 years. it was a very strange adjustment, since i hadn't used Windows at all in like, 8 years. but now Fedora KDE is my preferred OS for this computer. technically i'm dual-booting, but... KDE is so cozy to me... i only really switch to Windows if i need to access Clip Studio or Affinity Designer.

main laptop

after i built my PC, it was becoming increasingly apparent that i did actually need a laptop. not too long after i built it, my chronic pain issues were getting harder to ignore, and having access to a computer in bed or on a couch was vital. part of me was cursing myself for spending so much time and effort and money on it... but honestly, i don't regret it. i still use it a lot.

well! anyway. i invested in a laptop on sale. my priorities were "physically lightweight" so it wouldn't hurt my feeble body to move it around, 16GB RAM, and a 16:10 screen with good color ranges. it's an HP Aero whatever-the-fuck, it does not matter.

the listing said it shipped with Windows 10 but it came with 11 instead. i tolerated it for about a year and a half, before i finally broke down and got sick of how sluggish it felt. the mobile CPU allegedly performs better than my desktop in benchmarks - what gives???? i had already tried to bend Win11 to my will and pluck as many of the weeds as i could.

i didn't have much experience with Linux other than doing some experiments with it on older laptops, but... i thought maybe it was worth a try. i'd have to give up Clip Studio and get used to Krita, but everything else i used ran natively on Linux. the reason why i'm running LMDE over Linux Mint is that for some reason, the Linux Mint installer did NOT like something about my laptop's hardware and kept freezing and crashing... but LMDE installed fine.

unsurprisingly, it runs much smoother than Win11 did. the Cinnamon desktop environment is lovely. it's very Windows-like without a lot of the things that i dislike about modern Windows. my main complaint is that it's not quite as customizeable as i'd like, which is why i use KDE on my desktop. don't get me wrong, there's still plenty i can tweak, but i'm a bit - okay, more than a bit - neurotic about UI color schemes. hahahaha.

Surface Pro 2

my sibling handed this down to me because they didn't have much of a use for it these days. running modern-day Windows on it renders the poor thing unusable, so... with the power of linux-surface, i decided to try running Linux on it. this was actually my first time in 13 years trying to install Linux, and i sure picked kind of a weird device to experiment on. but i'm weird, so maybe that's appropriate.

fun fact: i thought it was the 256GB model, because that's what Windows was reporting. but when i went to repartition the hard drive, i noticed that it was actually 512GB... because my sibling already tried to install Linux on it years ago and divided up the partitions accordingly. lmfao. i immediately texted them "hey!!! you beat me to it! wtf!!" and they told me that their initial attempts were unsuccessful, but maybe the hardware support was better now.

happy to report: it is! the custom linux-surface kernel makes touch/pen support work pretty well. now, whether the operating systems make the user experience of touch functions usable, that's a different story... i've tried out a few different OSes to figure out which desktop environments work best for this lil guy.

Ubuntu with GNOME: meh. ehhhhh. but, i just don't like GNOME. even with Touchégg installed, which helps with touch gestures, it can be a little clunky to use. i just don't like how much GNOME hides basic user interface functions, and it's not great to use with my fingertips - i still use the pen a lot, but i gotta be pretty precise.

meanwhile, i like elementaryOS pretty well so far. i'm looking forward to the OS 8 update. but i'm also at home in its Mac OS-like interface, and it works well on the smaller screen of the Surface Pro 2. the App Center can be pretty laggy, though... i hope they fix that.

iMac G3 (early 2001, Indigo)

i LOVE my iMac G3. her name is "Blueberry Dreams", a nod to The Cheat's tangerine iMac G3 in Homestar Runner, nicknamed "Tangerine Dreams". i bought this in summer 2022, i think, from a local computer resale shop. it was only $50, fully tested, just had a bad RAM slot. owning an iMac G3 was one of my dreams ever since i was a kid, seeing them at school and at libraries... and i didn't know when i'd ever see one in such nice condition for such a good price again.

admittedly, the indigo variant wasn't my first color choice - i still pine after the Flower Power variant - but it's absolutely lovely. i'm smitten. my dad got me matching accessories for it as a Christmas present that year, which was very sweet of him.

right now, i mostly use it for poking at late 90s/early 00s digital art software, and occasionally some older games. at some point, i'd love to get a contemporary tablet (a Wacom Intuos2 6x8 would be nice...) so i can make art on it more often without giving myself an RSI. lol

ThinkPad T61

bought this in June 2023, because i wanted a solid XP machine. it was about $80 or so, which... honestly, for a well-built ThinkPad that had already been cleaned up and restored by the seller with a fresh install of XP on an SSD? i'll take it. i had tried restoring my own XP-era laptops, but i was running into a lot of issues that were proving to be outside of my skillset. it just seemed smarter to me to get one that was already functional and ready to go.

aye, she's a lovely machine, though. i'm quite fond of her. quite heavy, but solid. the keyboard feels pretty nice to type on, and it's a joy to work with. i've been happy with how easy it is to swap hard drives - just a screw or two on the front, and a drive bay cage pops out! how nice. i used a spare HDD to install Vista Business using official restoration discs, because i hadn't touched Vista since it was new, and i was morbidly curious. i should...get back to that project at some point.

for making art on it: i usually use an old 2008 Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop 7. which was the exact combination of tools i used when i started drawing digital art seriously! though on Vista, i installed CS2 instead, since that felt more era-appropriate. PS7 will always have a place in my heart, though. i know it like the back of my hand. oh, sometimes i'll doodle in openCanvas 1.1. that's "classics of free art program" to me. hehe

#computers #tulip tech toys