[COFF] Re: (redirected from TUHS) What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org>]

On Thursday, March 7th, 2024 at 2:44 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
> 
> > 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'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all
> (currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box
> (distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've
> tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I
> couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are
> similar.
> 
> More details:
> 
> 1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS
> 1984-1990: MS-DOS
> 1991-1992: Inactive UNIX
> 1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS
> 1997-now: FreeBSD
> 
> Greg
> --
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Not an old timer but feel like getting in on the fun.  My main system these days
is a Raspberry Pi 400 running a home-grown (but quite generic) Linux setup.
Started as a cross-compiled kernel with a Gentoo stage 3 stuck on top, then
started replacing and removing bits of userland.  The main Gentoo-ism still
around is that I didn't bump from OpenRC down to bare sysvinit, but pretty much
everything else has been replaced by upstream packages at this point.  Desktop
is X11/dwm, haven't quite gotten hip with the Wayland stuff these days.  I keep
a Windows 10 x86_64 desktop around for video games.  Work is then a macOS host
but frequently working in a remote Windows desktop, so I use Windows, mac, and
Linux pretty evenly in a regular day.

Have volleyed between FreeBSD and Linux historically, whichever has better
hardware support for the main machine I'm running at the time, with FreeBSD
preferred all things equal.  I've taken my approach with Linux for a long time,
opting out of distros wherever possible and rolling my own system build.  I've
found it keeps the things I want working while being adaptable to incorporating
new bits at will.  Firefox is the only major component that I don't build from
source, instead opting to grab updated binaries from Arch or Debian whenever I
feel like doing an update cycle.  Everything else I just nab from whoever makes
it and build it up from the source packages.  It's nice having intimate control
over what goes in /bin vs /usr/bin vs /opt/bin (no /usr/local tree here...)

On Thursday, March 7th, 2024 at 2:32 PM, Mike Markowski <mike.ab3ap@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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...
> 
> Mike Markowski

I find the Raspberry Pi 400 checks all my boxes for what I tend to work on,
although I'm not doing any, say, CAD or media editing, just writing code,
some image processing, document scanning, and web browsing.

- Matt G.