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.