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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