AM I AN IDIOT?

The sad truth is that while some people do see me as some sort of computer geek, I actually find a lot of this stuff endlessly confusing and a real struggle to sort out.
 

The reason I have such carefully organised systems is that it’s the only way I can get my head around the things I’m trying to do, and even with all my systems, I’m constantly getting confused or stuck.

Yesterday I was unable to log into any of my files and was starting to stress out, until I finally realised that I’d accidentally hit the caps lock on my keyboard, and that was why my passwords were all wrong.

That is a fairly easy mistake to make – does everyone else do that too or am I a lone idiot?

I’m trying to organise hundreds of thousands of files, and to maintain reasonable privacy, backups, and security, while also having switched to using Linux full-time a year ago, after using Windows for a quarter of a century.

People talk about switching to Linux as if it’s a quick and easy swap that only takes a few hours. I tried out half a dozen distros before choosing one, and have now spent more than a year having to sort out relatively minor but really awkward problems like external drives and USB sticks not working because of them being formatted wrong.

On top of that there are things like switching from Photoshop to GIMP… It might be easy for a real geek, but I find this stuff fairly difficult.

The thing that has caused me the most problems on both Linux and Windows is trying to share or sync files between different devices using cloud storage. That has caused all sorts of muck ups for years

When I see other people’s computer systems I have no idea how they manage to do anything at all. I’m constantly finding all this geek stuff really confusing, and barely a day goes by without me asking the question – “Am I an idiot?”

I think I’m a mid level computer user trying to avoid falling into systems of normie digital mind control, (like Windows or Google) and in some ways that seems to keep getting harder. But it keeps me on my toes, and I do seem to be slowly progressing.