PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: pyjujiop

As told to MrCrankyPants-YouCanToo

What is your name/username?
John Cate, or pyjujiop on the forums, which is a handle I've used on the Internet for 20 years. I originally created it for use on the AnandTech swaplist.



How old are you?
47

Are you married, single?
Engaged and soon to be married to Kayrenne Walker.

How about Kids, Grandkids (names and ages)?
When we marry, I will pick up a stepdaughter, Natalie, who is 35. I have long considered her to be family anyway.

Do you have pets, what is your favorite?
At the present time, we have no pets.

Are you retired, still working and if working, what do you do?
I am a professional journalist who has been in the profession since 1993. At the current time I am a freelancer working for media relations firms and open to new clients! My main client is operated by an old colleague of mine, who is hoping to bring me on full-time.

Where do you call home? What is it like? IE: weather, scenery
Presently in Mount Airy, NC. Probably will move closer to the Raleigh area once this coronavirus epidemic has run its course. This is in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains, and while it is not truly Mayberry, there's a lot to see around here.

Where did you go to school and what is your education level?
I have an AA degree and am very close to a bachelor's degree from Strayer University, but not currently attending.

What kind of things do you like doing? hobbies, travel, fishing, camping?
We travel a lot, and I'm a computer enthusiast, as you might imagine, and do a lot of that sort of thing on the side. I could get the A+ cert anytime I wanted to and probably will at some point.

Why and when did you start using Linux?
The first time I tried it was around the turn of the century, when the only computing experiences I had ever had were CP/M machines in the 1980s, followed by the classic Mac OS and Windows 3x and 9x in the 1990s. I'd heard about Linux a lot, living in the Raleigh area at the time, where Red Hat was always in the news.

I dabbled with it off and on (the first distro I ever tried was Mandrake, an ancestor of PCLinuxOS), but never had time to really learn much about it. The first time I used Linux seriously was Puppy 4.1.2 in the mid-2000s on older hardware, and later on, I used the old Zen-mini variant of PCLinuxOS on my main computers as a secondary OS around 2009-2012. However, I couldn't use Linux as my primary OS due to my work needing Windows. When I finally was able to make the move, late in 2015, I converted to Mint Cinnamon. I returned to PCLinuxOS as my main OS in January of 2019.

What specific equipment do you currently use with PCLinuxOS?
I have two computers presently running PCLinuxOS as their primary OS. One is a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop that has been completely overhauled; it now runs a 3.06 GHz T9900 CPU, 6 GB of RAM, and has both a 256GB SSD and a 640GB HDD installed. The other is a desktop with an Athlon X4 870K CPU at 3.9 GHz, with 16 GB of RAM and several HDDs and SSDs installed in the case. We have two other Windows machines and an Amazon tablet that Kay uses.

Do you feel that your use of Linux influences the reactions you receive from your computer peers or family? If so, how?
Not really, because I have pretty much been using my personal computer equipment for both personal use and work for many years. I have the ability to choose my own tools for the job and have never been questioned on it. We still have a Windows system at home because Kay requires it for certain things, but I have not used Windows as my primary OS for almost five years.

Most reactions I get are on the Q-and-A website called Quora, where I frequently discuss Linux and my choice of PCLinuxOS.

What would you like to see happen within PCLinuxOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings?
Honestly, I have no complaints about it. I would like PCLinuxOS to gain more users, but only because it would hopefully get more people to donate. I have no idea how Tex and the community manage to keep it as well maintained as they do. I returned to PCLinuxOS because I preferred the community-based model and the philosophy of this distro over using anything related to Ubuntu.