[TUHS] What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[ron minnich]

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 at 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 at 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
>> ᐧ
>> ᐧ
>> ᐧ
>>
>
>
> --
> *My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
>
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