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