my user-facing system is OSX on an m2, 96 G DRAM, 4T SSD. I have a system76, 40G DRAM, 4T NVME running linux for things needing linux. I have a USB Armory, 512M, running either a small Debian distro or Go on bare metal with Tamago. I have several systems that run TinyGo on bare metal.

I have a boatload of IoT under development, nowadays, all RISC-V. They run a cut-down Linux with ONE init process, written in Go, that implements a version of the Plan 9 cpu command, called sidecore (github.com/u-root/sidecore, first talk to be presented next month). As a result, most of the systems I have can run any distro I want, on a per-command basis, so in most cases the distro I run is called "make your choice". I can run any distro I want, with $HOME coming from $HOME, from OSX or Linux, and It Just Works. You Plan 9 folks have some idea what I mean, although sidecore actually does more.

WIth Go and Rust, distros matter much less. Most C nowadays is not written in a portable way anyways -- see a bit of the full sad story here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d0yK7g-J6oITgE-B_odadSw3nlBWGbMK7clt_TmXo7c/edit?usp=sharing -- so I've largely stopped using C at all. That, in turn, affects which systems I use for interactive work. 

So I guess the answer, in my case, is "whatever I need at the moment" -- since my UI is OSX, my build systems are OSX and Ubuntu, and my IoT are, on a command-by-command basis, "it depends."

cpu (and sidecore) is one of  those Plan 9 commands I could not live without, and Go made it possible to have it everywhere. It's even got an IANA number since last year -- 17010.

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:13 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

To my way of thinking, the OS itself matters only if you're developing or supporting the OS, or doing development for that OS. Otherwise, the overwhelming criteria are what applications are available. I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop for my photography, and those are available only for MacOS and Windows. Because of very bad experiences with Apple as a developer of apps for the iPhone, I don't like anything Apple, so I use Windows for my desktop and laptop, and an Android phone.

I often hear that there are Open Source equivalents for Lightroom and Photoshop, but the people saying that aren't serious photographers.

If you don't require any particular applications, then, as I said, the OS doesn't matter, so Linux and FreeBSD  are fine choices. I've long been impressed with how usable distros like Ubuntu have become over the years.

On rare occasions, I need to run a UNIX/Linux program, and for that I used to use the MacOS command line back when I used a Mac, and now use Windows System for Linux, which runs Ubuntu.

(Like everything else posted here, these are my opinions, likely not anyone else's.)

Marc Rochkind

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:52 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Like Marc Donner, my primary system, UNIX or otherwise, in which I'm typing this message, is a current late model MacPro (arm/Sonoma) - which I switched to Apple's UNIX flavor about 20+ years ago and have yet to look back. That said, I have almost every OS that runs on x86 from different Linux flavors and BSDs, plus lots of different I/O controllers for conversion in my basement.   Further, I also have a number of historical (non-Intel or Arm-based) computers on my different ethernets.   FWIW: I also have a ton of SCSI equipment that's either on a FreeBSD Box (most often), or I have a RATOC SCSI to USB2 controller cable that 'just works' on my Mac and/or any x86 laptop I have around.  It is known to talk to the disks as well as recently discussed Archive Viper QIC drives. That said, I've never tried the USB to SCSI cable with a Linux -- only MacOS and Winders (I never needed to use it with anything else).   Also, I have never tried that interface with 9-track, which is on the FreeBSD systems SCSI chain driven by an on-motherboard Adaptec PCI to SCSI. The only real issue I have had trying to use SCSI peripherals with MacOS is that traditional BSD <sys/mtio.h> is not included in the last N versions of the Apple developers tool kit, making a compilation of old tape-based C code a PITA. Still, if you install the controller and can manage to rebuild -- it all seems to work fine.

Clem

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My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com