We started with FreeBSD in 1992 soon after getting married. My wife is a computer scientist (I'm EE) and we loaded 3.5" diskette after diskette and then she worked on finding a graphics card driver. :-) In more recent times we ran gentoo but that was ordeal to keep up to date. Like a water cooled VW, tinkering is almost a daily requirement. In recent years we use Ubuntu distribution and enjoy it. My wife likes the ease of maintenance and as an RF engr I enjoy the ease of acquiring tools, including compilers. Thanks, Clem, for pointing me to ifort a year or two ago! (1968 F-IV RF propagation code revived at
https://udel.edu/~mm/itm/ in the retro computing section.)
I also use Raspberry Pi 3's in PiDP 8/I (
https://udel.edu/~mm/pidp8i/) and 11/70. I wonder how long till a R-Pi is enough for a work station...