I bought my current desktop computer over three years ago during senior year of college. It is a business-class Lenovo desktop that cost me under $400. I slowly added memory and storage as needed. It started out as an inexpensive way to get consistent performance, give me a place to play games, and was a general workhorse I could rely on.
A couple years ago, I switched to mainly using it with Linux (in particular Pop!_OS), and have been using it as my main podcast machine since. During the pandemic, it also became my daily work machine as it was better (and more familiar) than anything my company had to offer at the time.
I was messing around with it the other week and decided to upgrade it to a new OS release, in preparation for an even newer release that was forthcoming. Then I discovered too late that the update broke a vital piece of sosftware I use for podcasting. Nothing I did could fix it, and I had no backup ideas. (This has since changed, but isn’t important to the story.)
So, I made the tough decision to go back to the old OS version. However, since I’m a bad computer user, I made no backups. This meant the decision was to start completely fresh, losing any configuration I had done before.
This came at an opportune time. I recently switched to using a MacBook Air as my primary work computer, allowing my fresh start to ignore any work-related programs and accounts. It has now become a dedicated “hobby” machine, focusing on podcasts, writing, and bits of software I try to make.
It’s certainly a privilege to have a separate computer to do this. There’s also ways to use my “work” computer in the same way by having multiple users. But I do prefer Linux for my personal projects, and having a very clear separation is helpful for my mind. It’s allowing me to turn off work in a much stricter way than I have for well over a year.
Finally, while not everyone will have this same intuition, something about beginning from scratch makes the computer feel cleaner. Some things are snappier, and old files and random bits I installed for who knows why are gone. They’re always available if I need them again, but the cruft is gone and I feel better for it.