7 Mar
2024
7 Mar
'24
8:38 p.m.
On Thu, 7 Mar 2024, 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.
My current daily driver is Debian 11 (because I don't have the room for a
distro upgrade). Went back and forth between Debian and Windows since
about 2005.
I'd thought of trying to do my own rewrite of SVR4/4.2 for kicks, but I
don't think I'd be able to daily-drive it and I wanted to start with an
existing kernel - and getting started has proven to be about a pain.
(I've proposed both Linux, with clang and musl, and NetBSD, with clang and
its own libc, as the starting points.)
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.
No wonder, really, given the common ancestry.
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?
I think they've all gotten bloaty anymore.
-uso.