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<div dir="auto">SImple, reliable and useful is the key.<br />
<br />
Mobile devices are iphone / ipad. Fixed workstation is a hackintosh, but I'm thinking of buying an M3 mac mini. My kids prefer a mix of Ubuntu or Windows.<br />
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Home servers are a mixture - proxmox, opnsense, truenas core + scale, xcp-ng for some VMs for study (previously ESXi free tier). Twenty years ago I was running gentoo with a nightly build. But now I'm moving from Ubuntu over to Debian 12. This is also my homelab -- I learn by trying new stuff.<br />
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For my ex-father-in-law's business which I manage, I selected more easily supported platforms - Cisco for some routers, switches, phones and Call Manager Express + Unity, Ubiquiti for most of his APs, vmware for VMs (Apache, mySQL, mailcow...), pfsense, truenas core, lots of Ubuntu server and ArcaOS (OS2). </div>
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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:IBM Plex Sans">—</span><br />
<span style="font-family:IBM Plex Sans">Michael Usher</span><br />
<span style="font-family:IBM Plex Sans">University of California, Santa Cruz</span></div>
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<div name="messageReplySection">On Mar 7, 2024 at 06:23 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>, wrote:<br />
<blockquote type="cite">First it was Slackware with ctwm, then I wanted more stuff to work out<br />
of the box and went to xubuntu. Been there for 20+ years.<br />
<br />
On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 01:47:26AM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:<br />
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey; border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px 5px;padding-left: 10px;">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 /></blockquote>
<br />
--<br />
---<br />
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat<br /></blockquote>
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