[TUHS] What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Mar 8 00:23:32 AEST 2024


First it was Slackware with ctwm, then I wanted more stuff to work out
of the box and went to xubuntu.  Been there for 20+ years.

On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 01:47:26AM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
> I've been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my
> primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming, photo
> editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so.  Prior to that it was
> FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and Linux
> when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was working
> for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged from
> retired equipment.  I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI controller for
> whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware floppy by
> floppy.
> 
> When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think, I
> installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with an
> NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives.  Under Linux it was
> never entirely stable.  I asked on Usenet and someone suggested trying
> the other SCSI driver.  This was the ncr driver that had been ported
> from FreeBSD.  My stability problems went away and I decided to take a
> closer look at FreeBSD.  It reminded me of SunOS from the good old pre-
> System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad school
> in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched.
> 
> I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the user
> community was getting much larger, I was using it professionally at
> work and there was just a larger range of applications available. 
> Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big and messy
> and complicated it has all gotten.  Thinking of looking for something
> simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their
> primary home computing needs?
> 
> Jeff
> 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat


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