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As told to YouCanToo
What is your name/username?
Reziac (occasionally seen elsewhere as Rez Zircon)
How old are you?
62. Is that old enough to know better?
Are you married, single?
Single!
How about Kids, Grandkids (names and ages)?
Nope, none of those.
Do you have pets, what is your favorite?
In Real Life, I'm a professional dog trainer and breeder of classic working Labradors. I've had 14 generations of my own line (2nd oldest contiguous bloodline in North America and 4th oldest worldwide) and have finished 56 UKC Champions, including the only 100% field bred Lab to get a Best In Show anywhere in the world since 1974.
Are you retired, still working and if working, what do you do?
Semi-retired from training, though I still have my own dogs. I write science fiction (my ongoing space opera epic will probably be published next year) and edit for other writers. Used to have a side business in computer repair, but as they've become more disposable that's pretty much gone away.
Where do you call home? What is it like? IE: weather, scenery
I'm near Billings, Montana. The area is a mix of farm and ranchland, prairie, and mountains, so every direction looks different, but I'm just off the Yellowstone River. As to the weather -- Montana holds the world record for most extreme climate variation; our state motto is "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes -- it'll change!"
Billings Montana "Big Sky Country"
Yellowstone River
Where did you go to school and what is your education level?
I grew up in Great Falls MT which had one of the best school systems in the country. My first computer was my high school's IBM 1620 -- we wrote programs for it in Fortran 2-D, and it was a big deal when we upgraded from punch cards to paper tape.
Then went 3 years to Montana State University, majoring in Biochemistry and Microbiology... I needed just 3 more classes to graduate but all three were in the same timeslot, so it would have taken 3 more years to finish! At that point my brain had a disk-full error, and I went on to other things.
What kind of things you like doing? hobbies, travel, fishing, camping?
I'd travel more (I love driving) but when you've got a bunch of dogs, well, it's like having a pack of children. So I garden, fish, fix up the house, read, write, and mess with computers (right now I have five in service and a dozen more in my infamous Computer Closet).
Why and when did you start using Linux?
I first heard about Linux in 1994 or '95, when a friend described it as the new OS for "people who enjoy formatting their hard drives once a week". To this old DOS-head (I once had a DOS triple-boot setup) it sounded new and exciting. Went to the first LinuxWorld in 1998 and came home with a pile of CDs. The first I tried was RedHat 6, which unfortunately wasn't real useful and had dreadful performance. But I was still interested and kept testing distros whenever I could. I liked Mandrake 7.2 quite a lot -- still too buggy for everyday use, but KDE and the new Drake config system looked really promising.
Fast-forward to the present... I've always been happy with the Windows product line (once beaten into submission, my WinBoxen regularly boast uptimes measured in months or even years, and wouldn't dare crash) -- up until it left XP. My everyday boxen still run XP and XP64, but I didn't much like the changes in Win7, and as to 8/10 -- if I wanted a cellphone interface, I'd use a bloody cellphone! So if I need an updated OS, it's no longer going to be Windows, and I really dislike MacOS.
PuppyLinux has been my go-to boot disk for years, but it's not what I need in an everyday OS. So once again I started seriously testing distros -- in the last 3 years I've tried close to 150 -- some definitely better and more my style than others, but none really caught my eye and behaved the way I want for everyday... till I chanced on PCLinuxOS "Full Monty". Delightfully set up, nicely discoverable, and everything worked; maybe not yet quite my everyday desktop, but getting close. And as I continued to test, I kept coming back to the PCLOS variants... better performance, fewer issues and frustrations, easier config, nicer default setups.
And then I noticed the PCLOS/Trinity distro -- and finally after all these years of testing and hoping, I've found a Linux I can love! Looks and acts how I want in my desktop, has all the KDE apps that I like, and runs great... This one is a keeper!!
What specific equipment do you currently use with PCLOS?
I build frankenputers from salvage, so it's somewhat luck of the draw. As it happens I'd put together a "new" machine just in time to give it to PCLOS/Trinity -- runs well and everything works:
Motherboard: Asus P5B Deluxe
CPU: Intel Core2Duo 2.5GHz
RAM: 8GB DDR2
Video card: MSI/NVidia 256MB
Hard drive: Western Digital 350GB
What would you like to see happen within PCLOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings?
Because of my experiences across various OSs, I've become really leery of major changes, and exceedingly fond of stability. Keep it conservative, don't go off on wild tangents; remember that real users don't like rude surprises, and truly hate disappearing features.
Thanks for having me, and a big hello to everyone in the PCLOS family!
PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by YouCanToo, featuring a PCLinuxOS forum member. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.
If you would like to be featured in PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight, please send a private message to youcantoo, parnote or Meemaw in the PCLinuxOS forum expressing your interest.
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