I bought an HP EliteDesk 800 G6 mine hard drive plus 2 24” HP EliteDisplay E242 monitors for $200 from the organization that I used to work for that was selling them as surplus. They gave me 50% off what they were going to sell it to the general public.
I’m buying an 512 GB M.2 2230 SSD for it (maybe 1 TB) and am installing Arca Noae’s OS/2 AND Haiku on it.
Arca Noae’s OS/2 is OS/2 Warp 4.5 + updates for lots of drivers to run on current hardware plus updates to the OS to “modernize” it without making it look like something that isn’t OS/2.
You obviously know what Haiku is.
These are two OSs that I have LOVED (well it was OS/2 Warp 4.5 and BeOS 5.x that I loved) and I haven’t used either since the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Because BeOS went bankrupt and almost everyone stopped what they were doing with BeOS applications I forgot about it. And then IBM said that they weren’t going to update OS/2 anymore (they were abandoning it) so I looked for another OS to use and I downloaded over a dozen Linux distros and spent over a thousand hours over a year running different versions of Linux and other PC operating system (none of them from Microsoft) and found that I wasn’t enamored with ANY of them.
At the time Steve Jobs became Apple’s iCEO (interim CEO) while Apple was buying Steve Job’s NeXT operating system because it was far more polished than BeOS was (which Apple had STRONGLY considered buying but BeOS wasn’t polished enough and they were asking for too much money and obviously they had a [rocky] relationship with Steve Jobs who had built a respected OS with NeXT though it wasn’t profitable.
As iCEO Steve Jobs made a lot of painful cuts with Apple but he saved it from bankruptcy (they literally had a few weeks left of money before he made drastic cuts and reshaped the company into something that wasn’t losing money anymore) and then worked with Jony Ive (who TOTALLY f’d up the icons and everything else with his designs on MacOS and iPhone and iPad which I will NEVER forgive him for) to create the iMac which they started selling in 1998.
It ran Mac Classic and yes, there were plenty of issues with Mac Classic but it was FAR more stable than Win 3.1 (based on what I PERSONALLY used it for) and Windows ‘95 was NOTHING compared to OS/2 but Apple was working on Mac OS X which turned out to be great (personally I LOVED the original design of the interface and the Lick-able desktop and icons more than any other design over the years).
So why setup an Arca Noae OS/2 and Haiku computer NOW?
I retired in 2023 and I no longer have to use the #$(&#(&#$ Windows. Note that #$(*&#$(& is the NICEST thing I can say about Windows. And Apple stopped making and selling 27” iMacs. Yes, they still make 24” iMacs but cut 3” off of ANY part of your body and see if it makes a difference! It does! Too much of a difference and I HATE cables if I don’t need them.
Plus Apple’s software direction and quality has been lacking … no DECLINING since Steve Job’s death with a hardware person taking over as CEO of Apple who has no clue about design AND the fact that they are no longer making 27” iMacs, I’m leaving Apple after 27/28 years of Mas OS X/MacOS being my main personal computer and Windows (forced to use for my job because STABLE Mac OS X/MacOS or OS/2 jobs or anything STABLE as far as jobs were concerned where I didn’t have to worry about health insurance or my retirement I chose to work for a company that primary used Windows for as much as they could and grumbled MIGHTILY with anything Apple or Linux. But again, I didn’t have to worry about health insurance or retirement so I worked at a job that I HATED for 26 years.
But NO MORE #$(&#(&#$!!! NOW I get to use the OSs that I LOVED to use instead of tolerated or HATING them. So OS/2 will be my main OS until Haiku has enough software for me to maybe even leave OS/2 behind. But that seems like it will be in the medium term future and not near future.
What is stopping me from using Haiku full time and leaving OS/2 behind?
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Nothing that compares to Scrivener which is a writers toolbox that can do “almost” everything that I’ve ever needed when writing anything from a very short poem to things I’ve written that were over 800,000 words long (yes, Scrivener has a word counter and no, it wasn’t 800,000 characters like abc or 123) or WordPerfect and sorry for any program that you like and love but they they don’t have everything that Scrivener OR WordPerfect has that makes me love THEM.
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Libré office is POWERFUL but it is too different from Lotus 1-2-3 and the scripts that I built inside of it. For instance, I have EVERYTHING from EVERY book for the Advanced Second Edition of Dungeons and Dragons in a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3 that I created in the 1990s and just found on a 3.5 “floppy” disc. Back then I used it to create as many characters as I wanted (one sheet for each character) and all I had to do was start typing the name of any object or spell and it would fill in and adjust Armor Class, Hit Points, + or - to hit based on what I was going against and so on and so on and so on and … you get the idea. There wasn’t ANYTHING from ANY book that wasn’t in that spreadsheet that couldn’t be pulled up with a little bit of typing for it to autofill the rest and adjust anything that needed adjusting. To convert that to the spreadsheet in the Libré spreadsheet program would take more time than it took to create everything in the first place with Lotus 1-2-3 because I was an expert at 1-2-3 at the time and new every formula and every function backwards and forwards. I don’t know ANYWHERE NEAR enough about the spreadsheet program for the Libré spreadsheet program to convert it to that program and I’m not about to start.
PLUS, I started creating a from the ground up new adventure game with two other guys who ended up barely doing anything over the three years that they told me they were working on the graphics and the other parts they were responsible for. In the meantime I created a different combat system from D&D and a totally different magic system based off of radiation (which changed the DNA of humans eventually creating giants, trolls, etc., etc., etc., plus worked great for fireball spells with radiation damage (not enough time to explain more than .01% of how the magic worked) which I had been building in a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3.
I also had created a backstory which was different than the backstory that the other two had “created” which was so full of holes that Swiss cheese looks like a solid diamond in comparison. So I wrote a 400 page book describing one outcome that was possible using the ideas of the backstory and the world that we were creating. Again their version had so many things missing from it and they never gave me any updates so I created a world with over 1,000 three dimensional characters which had jobs (being a mom is FIVE jobs and even though I’m a man I KNOW that to be true) and part of their “identity” as I called their stats included whether or not they were lazy or driven. Instead of a dozen stats for each character, each character had ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE stats including even their favorite color, their favorite thing to wear, their favorite meal, their favorite dessert, there best friends (one through 5). How did I create them all? Easy, I created them randomly and then went back and see if they worked or not.
AND it wasn’t just the characters that had a LOT of stats. The town itself had a LOT of stats based on how lazy or driven or how GIFTED they were mechanically or with inventing things. Yes, my characters AND the town were very well worked out over those three years.
And during those three years my two “partners” perfected a rat den which they played over and over and over and over and over for three years playing with combat and magic that they didn’t know wouldn’t be included in the game because they didn’t have 99% of the combat and magic systems worked out except what worked against 1 Hit Point rats with them fighting with characters that they considered level 1 but I considered level zero because those characters had no training in the militia so since this was their first battle, where did they get proficient with anything in attacking the rats? From nowhere so … level zero.
They then had the NERVE to ask me for what _I_ myself created after I told them to #$(*&#$(& off and die. And no, I didn’t ask for their “perfected” rat den information.
Little by little, whatever it takes, and anyone that is willing to help out in a year when I’m ready to have someone else start helping me, the help will be welcomed. I would REQUIRE monthly if not weekly updated notes on what had been accomplished with some proof that you had accomplished anything before I trust you at all that you are actually doing anything. I’ve been burned a few times. I’ll assume I’m to blame for being a bad judge of character or that my personality is lacking so people don’t want to help. Oh well. I’ll do what I can alone if I have to.
But that is where I am with the computer part of my life. The rest of my life could be changing a lot too but I’m not going to talk about that.
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