Ever since I moved back to Pennsylvania from Texas, I haven’t felt right posting in my “Angela in Texas” blog.  So, even when inspiration struck, I did not write publicly.  I created this blog weeks ago, but never actually finished a post… until now, hopefully!

There has been a LOT of inspiration in the past few months.  Whenever I read an interesting article or study, I want to go to the web and share my opinion on it.  But I don’t like spamming Facebook, and I hadn’t started this blog up yet, so I had no outlet.  I hope to be better from now on.

I’m really only making the time to write now because my desktop is upgrading its operating system. I can’t get the work done I want to do tonight until that is finished.  So, I pulled out the ol’ Chromebook, and now the words are flowing out of me.

Since I brought it up, I guess I’ll talk about the tech changes I’ve undergone lately.  In the mobile department, I migrated from Blackberry to Android in May 2013 and it is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.  I still miss having a physical keyboard on my phone, but I love the Android platform.  I started with an LG Optimus G phone, but in October 2014 I bought an unlocked Sony Xperia Z2 and I LOVE it.  Besides loving the Android software, the hardware is fast, the screen is great, the camera is spectacular (20.7 megapixels!), and it is dust- and water-proof so I don’t have to worry about ruining it or breaking it in most of the usual ways.  I also have been through a few Android tablets in that time.  I started with a Nexus 7, then supplemented that with a 10 inch tablet by Asus.  Then once I got my new phone, those felt SO SLOW (because the hardware specs were so inferior) so I got rid of them and upgraded to a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact tablet last spring, which I also love (for all the same reasons I love the phone).  The Sony Xperia Z5 (the current model in that line) is getting a good amount of press now in the Android newsmarket, and rightfully so.  I highly recommend this product line to anyone, especially anyone who already uses Android.

As far as my more serious computing needs go, I’d long been planning to get a desktop once I got a “real job.”  The laptop I have was brand new and top-of-the-line when I got it in 2010, but it is heavy and clunky, and now it’s loud, it gets hot, and it has less RAM than my phone!  So, in May of this year (shortly after I bought the new tablet), I bought a Chromebook to hold me over until I could get a desktop.  It is exactly what I needed.  With my dedication to Android going strong, I was already a heavy Google-product user.  Those, of course, work great on the Chromebook.  The only other important thing I needed to be productive was a LaTeX editor.  There aren’t any full-fledged Chrome apps for that, but the in-browser editor Overleaf has been great (and I’ve converted at least 2 people to it since – I highly recommend it!).

At my new job, our department has two dedicated computer labs (because we also house the computing major).  The computers in those labs are built in-house by one of my new colleagues.  He also builds seriously kick-ass machines for us (department faculty) to use in our offices.  What I found out when I got here is that he can also repurpose old machines that used to be in the lab before the last upgrades and let faculty use those as home desktops.  So, I have a 5-year old desktop at home now, at no cost to me!  Both my office machine and my desktop machine were originally configured to dual boot Windows and Linux (8.1 and Fedora 22, respectively) when I got them.  I used Linux (Ubuntu) a lot for about 2 years in college while I was working on my computer science degree.  I never put it on the laptop I got when I graduated, so I never used it in grad school.  Every year or two, I would consider trying a dual boot machine again, but I never followed through for various reasons.  Besides, Windows 7 is a respectable operating system.

Anyway, after 1-2 months of using Windows 8.1 at home and at work, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I started playing around with Fedora 22.  Within 2 weeks, I was running Fedora 22 full time.  Windows takes forever to do ANYTHING, especially compared to Linux.  I’m still tweaking the configuration to get exactly what I want/need, but I’m almost there.  And I’ve learned so much in the past two months about computers and about Linux by Googling anything and everything that comes to mind.  Once it became clear to me that I would be using Linux exclusively for the foreseeable future, I looked into converting from a dual boot to a single boot.  I mostly got the idea, and got to work on my machine at home.  Unfortunately, I did some things out of order and ended up deleting the Windows partition without changing the boot manager first, so my machine would not boot – totally useless.  After some more troubleshooting, I ended up just wiping the entire hard drive and doing a fresh install of Fedora 22.  Then today Fedora 23 was released and that upgrade just finished running a few minutes ago.  It is VERY exciting to me, because the new version of the GNOME desktop environment has Google Drive integration.  So now I can finally access my cloud storage from my desktop without a browser, something I got very used to while using Windows, and something that Dropbox has supported on Linux forever but for some reason Google was dragging its feet on.

With all that said, when Windows 10 came out, I upgraded my laptop (from Windows 7). And I do like Windows 10.  It has a very pretty interface, and in some ways runs smoother than 7 or 8.  But it is still Windows, and it is still a lot slower than Linux.  Once I figured out how to turn off all the data collection and reporting back to Microsoft, it ran slightly faster.  I definitely already like it better than Windows 8.1, and with enough time I might have even liked it better than 7 (the “look” of 10 is definitely sleeker than 7).  But for now I’m pretty committed to Fedora 23.