Ok for starters I had named my computer after the space race Utwig from the game Star Control II The Ur-Quan Masters, because they were the most pessimistic and grumpy alien race, constantly wearing masks, like the Mask of Gruelling but Neccessary Activity to demonstrate emotions as their speech would drone on. It fit working with the operating system Windows 10 to a tee. I had to use the Windows 10 operating system when working in software engineering for the clients stack I was working with. It felt clunky, slow, and monolithic. But I was holding on to it as a symbol and state of my old work life. A bit silly I know, why hold on to bad tech to remind me of how annoying it was when I was working with it. Might as well move to brighter pastures that at least can run an update when I choose to over a minute without dying.
There are many choices in Linux, with different interfaces, drivers, support and features. All free and available in easily to install forms. So which distro was to be the next stage for my poor laptop, previously burdened under the mask of Windows 10. In this case hubby and I had a few better experiences with different distros and decided for a mixed dev environment Linux Mint would be good to try for a bit. With ME I have had issues trying to manage any tech level work again so the migration took several days and a couple drives died in the process. Then a quick install and it was hello to the new interface, (and much better running speed).
But what to call this new incarnation, it was no longer a burden, it was fast, clean, easier to configure and update. It gobbled new tasks eagerly. Also green. Keeping with the same name theme the new build seemed to name itself as the Supox, a race of highly intelligent semi-carnivorous plants, who lived quite close to the Utwig and were good friends and allies to them. The Supox were highly scientific and self reflective, accepting their unlikely origins.
Linux Mint is very reminiscent of other operating systems, an easy clean move in that many things are where you expect them and indeed much cleaner than Windows, (with its 4-5 settings locations which contradict each other).
As an example Gunnar's Phantom model gaming glasses to reduce eyestrain
In fact early on when hubby was recovering from his concussion brain injury, trying to recover and return back into coding he was finding the headaches from the screen glare especially hard. His occupational therapist recommended yellow tinged gamer glasses, (much like the glasses used by skiers and snowboarders to reduce the glare and damage to eyes from the light bouncing off the snow and ice). With special lenses these helped quite a bit to reduce eye strain and headaches. But also on top of that when he was on his computer he would use the app Redshift which helped quite a bit when he had to switch to his reading glasses for coding.
An extreme example of difference in colour temperature of a screen.
He had never configured Redshift though and since he did not have migraines the effects of the basic default settings were suitable enough. So for me to set up Redshift I needed to do some more research on setting the start up config, fixing a few no screen errors, and even moving both the evening and daytime setting further into the red spectrum as when a migraine hit, any light let alone blue light was painful. A few false starts, (I was selecting separate screens and set to automatically update night time based on geo location), changes in startup config location & tests and Redshift was now configured. The laptop was mostly restored, rebirthed and no longer felt like eye gouging. Now for a background image from free wallpapers.
A Snow Leopard?
A Tiger?
A White Tiger?
