Forty years of changing operating systems

In February 2025 I wrote in my notes: "I keep investigating operating systems, and it seems to be my current hobby." That was an understatement. Over the following year I installed something new on my laptop almost every month, and sometimes twice in the same week. Today that laptop runs Alpine Linux, and has done so since February 2026. This post is the story of how I got here. The short version covers two years. The long version starts more than forty years ago, with a rubber keyboard. A Spectrum, then a PC with no hard disk My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, in the early 80s. I can't recall the exact year. Like many people of my generation, that is where I learned that a computer is something you can understand and bend to your will, not just something you use. My first PC came in the late 80s: a Schneider EuroPC. It had an 8088 processor, 512 KB of RAM, Hercules graphics and no hard disk. Everything ran from diskettes. It ran MS-DOS, with no graphical environment. I remember…

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