I’m Gianmarco Gargiulo (pronounced /dʒanmarko ɡardʒulo/), a shy nerd that loves thinkering with computers, old tech and games, graphic design, art and video making. I’ve always been interested in computers since when my dad used his old desktop with Windows 98.
I’ve registered my first Google account on September 1st, 2012, pretty much marking my very first registered presence on the internet apart from my old Facebook account, on my old HP 550 laptop with Windows XP (it originally ran Windows Vista Home Basic). I used to have a little YouTube channel full of crappy videos made with Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Paint, I don’t even remember making most of these, I only remember of recording a bunch of VB.NET related tutorials with Camtasia, but I never uploaded them since properly exporting videos with Camtasia Studio was quite frustrating.
Talking about VB.NET, that was my very first exposure to programming, so I used to make crappy little programs in Visual Basic 2010, especially those that are generally referred to as VB OSes, which are little fake operating systems with their own apps and features, kinda like a simulator. My series of VB OSes was called “My mini OS” (or “My Mini OS”, “MMOS” for short). VB OSes would eventually become more popular among VB.NET coders in the following years (watch this for an in-depth history).
Back to YouTube, I really liked watching videos like computer tutorials, videos regarding videogames and funny street signs (don’t ask me why).
In around mid 2013 I got my second computer: the Asus Vivobook S200E laptop with Windows 8 (I’ve been using it as my secondary machine until the beginning of 2022). I was much more up to date in terms of software, including the latest version of Visual Studio Community Edition. I started making more and more of those VB OSes and these were the times when they slowly started to become popular.
I also made a new Google account on the May 14th, 2014, since I forgot the password for the old one long ago (but then I found it again so nevermind), so this meant that I was starting to make YouTube videos again. My videos were originally a bunch of generic tutorials on programs like Pivot Animator, Install Creator, TextAloud, some Nintendo emulators, including videos of me showcasing the many versions of my VB OS, from version 3 or 4 (I can’t really remember the very first one that I showed publicly) up to 16.1. In the meanwhile I started making other kinds of videos especially ones that were pretty much inspired by SMG4, my favorite YouTube channel at the time, and it lasted for around 26 episodes.
During these years of activity I got involved in several VB OS contests called “Battle OS” organized by an italian guy called xDragon System (now known simply as xDragon), I participated with some of the last versions of My Mini OS, especially the last one nicknamed Chocolate, and I always got a relatively high score for the UI looks, generally inspired by Google’s Material Design, of which I was a big fan back then, giving me confidence in graphic design, even though I always made some kind of crappy graphic design stuff using PowerPoint 2013/2016.
On August 18th, 2016, I assembled my first desktop since it was my birthday, I still use it today, although some of the specs were updated like the RAM and the graphics card. On October 24th, 2016, I announced that I was working on two projects: Nova (a Minecraft server) and Remix (a completely new VB OS series, later renamed to codename “Infectious”, inspired by the song by Tobu); unfortunately both projects ended up being cancelled simply because they required too much time and effort. On November 19th, 2016, since my channel had too many old and crappy videos, I made a new one trying to revamp my content with some 3D animations made in a program called Mine-Imator and with some YouTube Poops, but I eventually quit making videos completely after a few months.
On March 3rd, 2017, I opened my fourth and last Google account, calling it originally G Softwares because I still was into VB.NET and at the time I was probably still working on Infectious. I kept this brand also when I quit VB.NET and started experimenting with Unity and C# in late 2017; on December 12th of the same year I compiled the first Pre-Alpha of my little game called Bubble Knife, the development continued for most of 2018 until July 30th, when I released the first Alpha (v1.0.0) on GameJolt. After one small update on August 26th (v1.1.0), the game’s development was cancelled and support was dropped on March 1st, 2019.
In late 2018 I was tired of all of the bloatware that Windows 10 had to offer so I tried to hackintosh my PC with macOS High Sierra (I later upgraded to Mojave), since I had already hackintoshed my laptop with macOS Sierra, which turned out to be a pretty pleasing change.
Between 2017 and 2018 I started to get interested in art and photography; on May 24th, 2018, I opened my Instagram account where I posted my drawings and photos of landscapes and such, including some photos that I took all the way back in 2016. I also opened a DeviantArt and a Dribbble account the year after. I got my first drawing tablet for my birthday, the Huion H420 which is a small tablet with no screen, then two years later I got the Huion Kamvas 13 2020 which this time had an actual screen to look at while drawing on it. I used to make drawings and small animations on a software called FireAlpaca, but at some point I eventually decided to move to another software called Krita since it was generally better in terms of features and reliability.
This is when I approached the world of GNU/Linux and free and open source software (Krita was developed by KDE which makes a lot of FOSS) and in late 2019 I made the switch to Kubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu which ships with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and later switched to Arch Linux. This was also the year I started self hosting my website among trying to host other things with the old HP laptop, firstly on Windows and then on a bunch of Linux distros.
In early 2020 I closed my old G Softwares website and made a new one with the Gianmarco Gargiulo branding, its purpose was to be a portfolio of my works, I eventually decided to remake the website using a static site generator called Hugo on August 9th, 2021, since it was more optimized and less of a pain to manage. During the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020 I decided to start making YouTube videos again about kinda obscure hardware and software, speedpaints of my drawings and also videos about my opinions on tech with a (unoriginal) format that I like to call “dvlog” (drawn vlog) and later on by more casually recording my screen and just talking, although extremely sparingly.
In late 2022 I participated in the Apple Developer Academy in Naples after passing a selection, I also became member of the NaLUG (Napoli GNU/Linux User Group) at which I also started doing public speeches in late 2023 about free software, self hosting, etc.
This page is always updating! Don’t forget to check out my CV (english, italian).