If your “FIRST STEP” is to choose an OS: Fuck that.

You should never have to change your OS just to use this crap. It’s all written in Python. It should work on every OS available. Your first step is installing the prerequisites.

If you’re using something like Continue for local coding tasks, CodeQwen is awesome, and you’ll generally want a context window of 120k or so because for coding, you want all the code context - or else the LLM starts spitting out repetitious stuff, or can’t ingest all of your context so it’ll rewrite stuff that’s already there.

1. • Learning. If you ever found yourself tired of learning new things, your life is basically done.
   • Cost. You already have an internet connection at home. It’s practically a necessity these days. The connection is likely fast enough for most things. Renting even the most piddly of VPS is wildly expensive. Just throw a spare machine at it and go wild.
   • Freedom. Your own data is constantly being collected, regurgitated, and sold back to you. More people need to care about this incessant invasion of our lives.
2. • Backups. 3 copies, on different forms of storage, in multiple PHYSICALLY distinct locations. Just when you have that teeny little imp in the back of your mind say “hmm, I should probably back up soon” – stop everything you’re doing and run a backup.
   • Test your recovery! Backups are only good if you can recover from them. Many have lost data because they failed to ever fail-test their backups.
3. • Google. Legitimately the best skill you can ever attain is simply being able to search effectively and be able to learn jargon quickly. Once you have the lingo down, searches become clearer, quicker, more precise.