SImple, reliable and useful is the key.

Mobile devices are iphone / ipad.  Fixed workstation is a hackintosh, but I'm thinking of buying an M3 mac mini.  My kids prefer a mix of Ubuntu or Windows.

Home servers are a mixture - proxmox, opnsense, truenas core + scale, xcp-ng for some VMs for study (previously ESXi free tier).  Twenty years ago I was running gentoo with a nightly build.  But now I'm moving from Ubuntu over to Debian 12.  This is also my homelab -- I learn by trying new stuff.

For my ex-father-in-law's business which I manage, I selected more easily supported platforms - Cisco for some routers, switches, phones and Call Manager Express + Unity, Ubiquiti for most of his APs, vmware for VMs (Apache, mySQL, mailcow...), pfsense, truenas core, lots of Ubuntu server and ArcaOS (OS2).  


Michael Usher
University of California, Santa Cruz
On Mar 7, 2024 at 06:23 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>, wrote:
First it was Slackware with ctwm, then I wanted more stuff to work out
of the box and went to xubuntu. Been there for 20+ years.

On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 01:47:26AM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
I've been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my
primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming, photo
editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so. Prior to that it was
FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and Linux
when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was working
for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged from
retired equipment. I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI controller for
whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware floppy by
floppy.

When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think, I
installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with an
NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives. Under Linux it was
never entirely stable. I asked on Usenet and someone suggested trying
the other SCSI driver. This was the ncr driver that had been ported
from FreeBSD. My stability problems went away and I decided to take a
closer look at FreeBSD. It reminded me of SunOS from the good old pre-
System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad school
in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched.

I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the user
community was getting much larger, I was using it professionally at
work and there was just a larger range of applications available.
Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big and messy
and complicated it has all gotten. Thinking of looking for something
simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their
primary home computing needs?

Jeff


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Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat