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

Marc Rochkind mrochkind at gmail.com
Fri Mar 8 04:32:52 AEST 2024


Minor correction to Thomas (but nothing is too minor for this list ;-) ):

Chromebooks run ChromeOS, undoubtedly based on some form of Linux, as is
Android.

Marc

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 9:33 AM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

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

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