One Week, Door to Door
My System76 RMA Experience
John Crenshaw
arch
Building My System, Piece by Piece
My career in backend development taught me how systems work from the inside out, but I spent those years using systems other people built. Now I get to ask what if we did it differently, and actually find out
Personal
Still Skidding Broadside
I'm 69 years old and most of my friends are gone. Not from age, but from AIDS. This is the story behind the blog, the Arch install, and a lifetime of building my own things because nobody was going to build them for me.
The Desktop Outgrew the Distro
I loved Pop!_OS and ran 22.04 for years. System76 built something special with that distro, and when they announced they were writing a new desktop environment from scratch in Rust, I was all in. Three years of alphas and betas later, COSMIC shipped in December 2025 and it&
software
Death by Yes
I've Spent 43 Years Securing Systems. Here's Why I Don't Trust Software That Can't Say No.
Privacy
You Built a Network of Snitches
You didn't get hacked. You just bought a bunch of devices that were designed to spy on you. Time to take your network back.
Why I Started Writing Rust in Retirement
I retired in March 2024 after 40 years of writing software. A decade at Salesforce, and before that a long trail of jobs going back to the early 80s. I was done with sprints and Jira tickets and getting paged at 2 AM, it was time to relax. I don&
wayland
Wayland in 2026: The 'Not Stable' Myth Needs to Die
The arguments against Wayland are frozen in 2020. The technology moved on.
github
Why I Left GitHub
Microsoft is training AI on your code without consent. I moved to Codeberg.
linux
Distro Hopping to Nowhere: How I Landed on Vanilla Arch for COSMIC
A year of bad decisions, documented for your entertainment.