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<p>What I use: Debian 6.0.10, Gnome 2.30.2, on VMware Player 3.1.6,
on Windows 7. All on a ThinkPad X220.<br>
</p>
<p>I don't so much recommend these specific versions of each of
these tools, it's just that once I got something working and
learned the ins and outs of all the system administration to keep
the whole thing healthy, I wasn't willing to take on learning a
bunch of new stuff for new versions, especially since I didn't
particularly like the direction the look and feel of all the later
versions, seemed to be going.</p>
<p>I've flirted with Mate to take the place of Gnome 2, on later
Linuxes, but those Linuxes needed later VMware versions, and so
on, so I came back to what I had working.<br>
</p>
My advice for someone just trying to sort out what they want to use,
is to get a configuration, whatever it is, that lets you work most
of the time the way you want (something Unix'y, for me), but then
have one "necessary evil" environment for those things you can't do
any other way.<br>
<br>
Putting most of your preferred "world" under a virtual machine,
running on a "not-great-but-still-supported-at-the-moment" OS, helps
make your set-up more portable when you change host machines and
operating systems, when your computer hardware wears out, or when
you need a new computer for some other reason.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 03/07/2024 02:21 PM, Adam Thornton
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAP2nic3TyyDzyEbrRP4WW98FPaZ53C0bp=Md0eokRKj3bF83JQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Daily driver is MacOS. Local network services,
mostly Linux on amd64. Retrocomputing, mostly Linux on
Raspberry Pi.<br>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at
11:47 PM Jeffry R. Abramson <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:jeffryrabramson@gmail.com">jeffryrabramson@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">I've
been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my<br>
primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming,
photo<br>
editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so. Prior to that
it was<br>
FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and
Linux<br>
when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was
working<br>
for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged
from<br>
retired equipment. I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI
controller for<br>
whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware
floppy by<br>
floppy.<br>
<br>
When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think,
I<br>
installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with
an<br>
NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives. Under
Linux it was<br>
never entirely stable. I asked on Usenet and someone
suggested trying<br>
the other SCSI driver. This was the ncr driver that had been
ported<br>
from FreeBSD. My stability problems went away and I decided
to take a<br>
closer look at FreeBSD. It reminded me of SunOS from the good
old pre-<br>
System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad
school<br>
in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched.<br>
<br>
I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that
the user<br>
community was getting much larger, I was using it
professionally at<br>
work and there was just a larger range of applications
available. <br>
Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big
and messy<br>
and complicated it has all gotten. Thinking of looking for
something<br>
simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use
for their<br>
primary home computing needs?<br>
<br>
Jeff<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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