<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 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></div>