update

Hi im back i think. I just wanted to give a little update on some things i've been doing recently since I have not updated this website in a while!!!! I still want to keep working on the website just to clarify this isn't me saying goodbye I've just been lazy oops sorry. I think I stopped working on the website after like i got finished with AP exams i think ?? around there. I think the main reason that I stopped working on the website was because my birthday was coming up (im 18 now woo) and I wanted to get a new laptop because I've been obsessed with the idea of having linux on a computer for a while. So the reason I'm back now is because my laptop came in the male (get it) and I'm writing on that laptop running linux right now actually and I just wanted to talk a bit about that and some other things! The laptop I got was a Thinkpad T480s, which was around $300 on Amazon refurbished. I've been going through this realization recently that a lot of the things we use and pay for leaves us in a spot where we don't have full control. Or if not full control we don't have the control we want. I'm talking about tech here I suppose and definitely windows. Companies are obsessed with making laptops and phones thinner and thinner and the compromises that they have gone through in order to achieve this "sleek" and "thin" aesthetic is wild. Apple is the main culprit here I think the obsession started right after Apple released their macbook laptop. This circles back to the idea of control because of how in order to make this tech thinner these companies take the time to solder in all of their components straight into the motherboard. There's an argument to be made here that the "average consumer" doesn't need their laptop to be able to be upgraded like that, as most consumers aren't poking around in the back of their laptop. However most consumers do break things, and when they break things they try and go get them fixed. I don't think I need to spell it out but it's a little harder to fix something when the broken component is melted into the motherboard. I guess this is another criticism of apple and the joke that everyone makes about them and the Apple "genius bar", about how 9/10 they don't fix anything and just tell you to buy the newest $1000 laptop. I don't know about you but that's a little bit insane. You spend however much on buying this new "cutting edge" laptop then you're done for a year later when something inevitably goes wrong and you get some error when it boots or something. Then when you try to get it repaired they tell you that your laptop has lost support or something because it's too old and you need to buy another one. I'm sure there is a group of people who really don't care and have the money to burn. But I feel the rest of people are those who do care, and those who don't care because they don't know that they do want to have that control. I guess if you really wanted to have that full customizibility over your tech you would just do something like make your own full computer and not get a laptop but I digress. I got this Thinkpad because it's just amazing value for it's price. I did want to get one to have a system that I could use Linux on, without the risk of using my other laptop and accidently wiping my drive or something, but I also wanted a laptop that I could use for when I go to college in the fall. Maybe it's not the best idea to have a laptop with Linux on it for a school laptop, as idk it might break or a program that the college wants me to use isn't supported on Linux, but either way I don't really mind since I still have my other laptop to fall back on, and I keep finding more and more reasons why I like using Linux more than Windows. I also got a Thinkpad, specifically this model because of how upgradeable it is, while the T480s in particular does have some limitations in terms of upgradability I took some sacrifices to upgradability for more convenience. The T480 is fully upgradable, but the T480s just comes with a better screen, though it does have 1 slot of RAM soldered in and is missing the battery pack. Even though the laptop I got was less upgradable I liked having the choice between the two. Okay I'm going to talk about Linux for a bit. Please don't leave.

My only experience with Linux was just seeing terrible memes and gifs about how hard it was to do anything on Linux. The amount of negative PR Linux gets from teenagers on reddit trying to get other teenagers on reddit to laugh is astonishing. I can't say anything though because Linux users are probably more likely to use reddit anyway, again I digress. I don't know what sparked my interest, as many things recently my interest in Linux could be as a result of me wanting to be like Aztrosist since I learned a few months ago that she uses Linux, or more specificaly Debian. I started watching stuff about Linux and had the unreal realization that it's not as crazy as people make it out to be. There are a million distributions out there that aim to make the user experience as simple as possible, and literally just like any other operating system that people have grown used to except like... better. Better simply just because you have that control over you system and everything that happens inside of it. And better because you can make these tradeoffs between having more or less control depending on how much you really need. The more I learned about Linux the more I realized how insane it is that a stock installation of windows comes packaged with a million ads and how every windows update tries to install Candy Crush for you. I don't want to play Candy Crush. I like having fun. On top of that copilot just sucks. I have never used copilot and never will, and I especially don't want microsoft using any of my data to try and make copilot "better". If you open your privacy settings on Windows there are literally a million different sliders you can activate, each one opting you into giving microsoft more data. Data which will only be used to serve you ads more effectively. Linux has none of that, Linus Torvalds the creator of the Linux kernel is a literal godsend. Everything completely open source, available for anyone anywhere to add and remove anything, whenever they please. And even be able to collaborate to improve the OS as a whole. Linus is literally the guy who invented git it's insane how much impact he has had. Okay so yeah, there's a few reasons why I wanted to have Linux. I needed to choose a distribution so I didn't go for one of the "easy" ones and I chose the most insufferable one to use first. I'm using Arch currently. During the time when I was waiting for my Thinkpad to ship I was trying to decide what Linux distro I wanted to use. I fell onto Ubuntu, which is an offshoot of Debian which is considered to be one of the most stable Linux distributions out there, with every update being tested for years in advance. I liked the idea of Ubuntu, but honestly I just really just wanted to be able to cutomize my system as much as possible. I could've done that on Ubuntu but because of how stable it is some of the window managers I wanted to use would not be available. So I went with Arch, installed it and loaded hyprland onto it. I'm becoming a stereotype but it's ok I'm having fun with it. I've been using Arch now not long at all, maybe like 3 days, and I finished a simple customization of my system and installed literally just what I needed to get here. It's crazy I feel like I've brought the laptop to a point where everything looks nice and that I am capable of doing everything that I need to do on here, with the entire system and everything I've installed only taking up 18 gigs of storage on my SSD. In these few days I haven't done anything crazy, the most insane part was probably installing Arch that was a hassle since I didn't want to use the install script. It took me about 3 or 4 hours but I feel like I've definitely learned a lot from it. The thing I'm most proud of is this like 10 line bash script I wrote that uses wofi and pywal to allow me to quickly switch wallpapers and change the entire color scheme of my system based on the colors in the wallpaper. I am definitely being carried by pywal here though. Here's a few photos of my current layout:

I have a wallpaper folder with like 20 other wallpapers I can switch too and it's awesome (i think about 70% of them are nge related idk what came over me) This is what the selector looks like, I have this weird like blue border around my selected element and I still haven't figured out how to get rid of that but I'm working on it.

Also ignore how in the bottom left and right corners of the selector the background of the elements overlay the border im working on that too i swear...

I guess I'll wrap things up now, with some few final updates and things. First shoutout to my friend Hiro who i mentioned previously in the first draft of this update but not this version so you probably have no idea who that is, but thank you so much for the new domain name that you got me (hybyrn.net now !!!!) it's awesome i love u. Also shoutout to his website that he's making I don't think he has an 88x31 button so I can add him to any sort of webring, but I'll link his website here. Knock yourself out. (porter robinson reference)

6/6/2025