For day-to-day (email, web, blah blah) I keep a relatively current MacOS box.  In addition I keep a ‘toy data center’ - a set of four NUC machines running Ubuntu on which I keep my various system management projects and development projects.  They are all headless, so I have a small hdmi display I plug in when I need to do release upgrades and other tasks that require a ‘console’.


On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 4:10 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
"Jeffry R. Abramson" <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering what
> do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?

I run Ubuntu Mate.  All the nice features of Ubuntu, plus a more
normal UI and everything just works.  In particular it handles
current hardware (laptops, wifi, etc) fine, as well as knowing about
network printers, generally without problems. I work with a bunch
of terminal windows with Bash and gvim for editing, evince for viewing
PDFs and a web browser.

If you want a more do-it-yourself kind of feel, you might try some
variant of Plan 9; the 9front fork is the most actively developed.
Plan 9 has ben on my to-do list for a few decades now; maybe once
I retire I'll actually get to it. :-) Be forewarned that there's
a learning curve there, Plan 9 is most definitely NOT Unix.

HTH,

Arnold