What I use: Debian 6.0.10, Gnome 2.30.2, on VMware Player 3.1.6, on Windows 7. All on a ThinkPad X220.

I don't so much recommend these specific versions of each of these tools, it's just that once I got something working and learned the ins and outs of all the system administration to keep the whole thing healthy, I wasn't willing to take on learning a bunch of new stuff for new versions, especially since I didn't particularly like the direction the look and feel of all the later versions, seemed to be going.

I've flirted with Mate to take the place of Gnome 2, on later Linuxes, but those Linuxes needed later VMware versions, and so on, so I came back to what I had working.

My advice for someone just trying to sort out what they want to use, is to get a configuration, whatever it is, that lets you work most of the time the way you want (something Unix'y, for me), but then have one "necessary evil" environment for those things you can't do any other way.

Putting most of your preferred "world" under a virtual machine, running on a "not-great-but-still-supported-at-the-moment" OS, helps make your set-up more portable when you change host machines and operating systems, when your computer hardware wears out, or when you need a new computer for some other reason.

On 03/07/2024 02:21 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
Daily driver is MacOS.  Local network services, mostly Linux on amd64.  Retrocomputing, mostly Linux on Raspberry Pi.

On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 11:47 PM Jeffry R. Abramson <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com> 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