For the last few years, our home has been exclusively Apple territory: Macs, iPhones, iPads, even Apple TV.  No Apple Watches yet. (More on that later.) The reason for this lack of diversity had nothing to do with brand loyalty, narrow experience, esoteric philosophy, or even plain-old snootiness. It’s pretty simple, really: I had no time for messing around. With three young boys, two very demanding jobs, and very high personal expectations, my wife and I simply didn’t have time to fool around with things that didn’t work without a struggle. In my experience at the time, Apple products were the closest I’d seen to the goal: “It just works.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no lightweight when it comes to information technology. I work in a technical field and I have years of experience with system administration, software and internet development, and IT support. But this wasn’t the time. At home, I needed a break from it. Things needed to work, and I didn’t want to spend any of my precious personal time fighting with our devices. So, Apple was it.

Recently, however, I’ve begun returning to the wider world of computing. It started with VMs: running various Linux and Windows flavors in Parallels for Mac just to see what they were like, after a few years spent out of circulation.

I replaced the ancient Mac I’d been using as a server (backups, home music library, web servers, and various and sundry other utilities) with a bare-bones Intel NUC running Fedora Linux.  Nostalgia for my days at the University of Michigan kicked in and I even brought up my own Kerberos realm and AFS cell for personal cloud storage.

Then, I began practicing the dark art of IT necromancy: resurrecting an old MacBook that we’d stopped using years ago but never quite managed to discard by upgrading its internals (HDD to SSD, maxing out the RAM slots) and replacing OS X with Linux.

After losing one of our cars’ garage door opener remotes, I set up a Raspberry Pi with a web-based interface for triggering the door and–since I could now control it on my smartphone from anywhere in the world–sensing whether it was open or closed. It was about this time that I realized that I was fully out of the walled garden.

My latest step was purchasing a cheap–but thoroughly modern–non-Apple laptop: a Dell Inspiron 2-in-1, with SSD, gobs of RAM, a 13″ 1080p display, and a touchscreen. You can’t get a Mac like that, for reasons that make sense but still leave me dissatisfied. I loaded up the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and am having a ball finding out what blazingly fast, touch interface, laptop computing is like.

It’s taking a fair bit of time getting it all working the way I expect it to. It’s been two days now, and I have a long bullet list of tweaks I need to make. But our kids are older, spending more time in school, and are (finally!) able to do a lot of things for themselves. I’ve got free time again, and now I have a hobby to spend it on.