[TUHS] What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[TUHS] What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Douglas McIlroy]

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Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows. Cygwin plus the sam editor
make me feel at home. The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing,
File Explorer and Task Manager.

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[John Cowan]

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On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 2:42 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:


Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows.
>
I run Windows because it's easy to get third-party maintenance for Windows
or Mac, and Windows is easier to tune.

Cygwin plus the sam editor make me feel at home.
>

Ditto, except I don't like TUI editors, so I use `ex` and drop into `vi'
mode when I need to bounce on the % key when doing Lisp.  The benefits of
`sam -d` over `ex` aren't big enough to justify changing years of habit.

The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing, File Explorer and Task
> Manager.
>

I use both Edge/Bing and Chrome/Google depending on what's integrated with
them.

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Wesley Parish]

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I've used Microsoft products on many an occasion; I have to say, they 
did lift their game as time went on. I have used Windows 3.x, but 
generally the times I installed it on my 486 generally led to me erasing 
it for something less fragile. My current main box is Fedora, and before 
that it was Kubuntu, and before that it was Win 8.1 and before that Win 
76.x - economics; those were the only machines I could then afford when 
my PCLinuxOS box died. I've played around with OpenSolaris, which was an 
eye-opener for someone who'd used Linux almost exclusively since I'd got 
my hands on Slackware 3.x on CDROM, before transitioning to Mandrake 
9.0, and thence to PCLinuxOS.

Though, Linux is still more robust than Windows - I've got a PC running 
MS Win10, which has shown me a blank white screen the last time I booted 
it, while the time Fedora had a display driver issue, I was able to 
update the system the following day and solved that issue in the process.

Wesley Parish

On 9/03/24 05:09, John Cowan wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 2:42 PM Douglas McIlroy 
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
>
>     Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows.
>
> I run Windows because it's easy to get third-party maintenance for 
> Windows or Mac, and Windows is easier to tune.
>
>     Cygwin plus the sam editor make me feel at home.
>
>
> Ditto, except I don't like TUI editors, so I use `ex` and drop into 
> `vi' mode when I need to bounce on the % key when doing Lisp.  The 
> benefits of `sam -d` over `ex` aren't big enough to justify changing 
> years of habit.
>
>     The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing, File Explorer
>     and Task Manager.
>
>
> I use both Edge/Bing and Chrome/Google depending on what's integrated 
> with them.

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Stuff Received]

On 2024-03-07 01:47, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote (in part):

> 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
> 

Unsure whether this is any simpler but, being retired, I have an M1 mini 
on my desk running MacOS and a T2000 downstairs in the spare bedroom 
running Solaris 11.3.

S.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Will Senn]

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Seems like. I think somebody was dissing FreeBSD in this here thread, 
too. Let's go there... or not. Coff, coff...

On 3/8/24 9:45 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
> Nah, I 100% agree about systemd. But systemd is such an easy target...
>
> Warner
>
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2024, 8:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>     I'm gonna let this topic go or Warner and I will get into a pissing
>     contest that nobody wants to hear.
>
>     On Fri, Mar 08, 2024 at 10:36:12AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>     > +1
>     > ???
>     >
>     > On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 10:01???AM Marc Donner
>     <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:
>     >
>     > > Let me remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
>     > > =====
>     > > nygeek.net <http://nygeek.net>
>     > > mindthegapdialogs.com/home <http://mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>     <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>     > >
>     > >
>     > > On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 9:42???AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>     > >
>     > >> > You like that abomination known as "systemd"?
>     > >>
>     > >> No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it. 
>     Which is almost
>     > >> never.  Not a fan.
>     > >>
>     > >
>
>     -- 
>     ---
>     Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Warner Losh]

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Nah, I 100% agree about systemd. But systemd is such an easy target...

Warner

On Fri, Mar 8, 2024, 8:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I'm gonna let this topic go or Warner and I will get into a pissing
> contest that nobody wants to hear.
>
> On Fri, Mar 08, 2024 at 10:36:12AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > +1
> > ???
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 10:01???AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Let me remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
> > > =====
> > > nygeek.net
> > > mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
> > >
> > >
> > > On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 9:42???AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> > You like that abomination known as "systemd"?
> > >>
> > >> No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it.  Which is
> almost
> > >> never.  Not a fan.
> > >>
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Larry McVoy]

I'm gonna let this topic go or Warner and I will get into a pissing 
contest that nobody wants to hear.

On Fri, Mar 08, 2024 at 10:36:12AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> +1
> ???
> 
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 10:01???AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Let me remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
> > =====
> > nygeek.net
> > mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 9:42???AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> >> > You like that abomination known as "systemd"?
> >>
> >> No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it.  Which is almost
> >> never.  Not a fan.
> >>
> >

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

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Clem Cole]

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+1
ᐧ

On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 10:01 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let me remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 9:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> > You like that abomination known as "systemd"?
>>
>> No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it.  Which is almost
>> never.  Not a fan.
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Warner Losh]

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On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
> > > What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
> > > itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
> > > OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
> > > minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
> > > tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
> > >
> > > -Ben
> >
> > The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
> > KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. ??Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. ??My
> > wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
> > that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
> > ??I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
> > Windows 7. ??All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
> > to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
> >
> > As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
> > just for kicks. ??It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
> > storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. ??I
> > just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
> > from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
> > FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.
>
> So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1,
> really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.
>
> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while
> back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I
> walked the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand
> if you have installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI"
> for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience
> is _awful_.
>

We must be using different installers. The defaults just work.

But so what. Even if it was awful, it's the first 5 minutes of your
experience... People don't use the installer, and with the VM images
there's even less need to day to fixate on it.

And to be fair, it isn't from the 80s. In the 80s, you booted a tape
and got. stuck with whatever partitioning the disk driver had. In the 90s
you used a calculator to figure out the labels to put on the drives
as we started to get a diversity of disks. In the 2000s, everything was
still text based, like FreeBSD's installer, but helped you partition things.
It wasn't until the 2010s that the installers started to become graphical
on a wide-spread basis.

But try installing ZFS root. FreeBSD's installer just does the right thing
setting it up. For Liunx, despite it's "awesome" graphics experience, I
had 6 pages of instructions from the OpenZFS web site to do it. So while
it looks nicer, for sure, there's still some UX issues to overcome.


> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead
> it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example
> from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the
> machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was
> graphical and it was just easier to tab through the options than go
> find a mouse.
>

FreeBSD's installer doesn't need a mouse... And Linux installers
have been hit or miss on this issue over the years (mostly a hit,
but not always)...

And despite all the pro-Linux Netcraft propaganda, FreeBSD is
not dying.


> I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better.
> Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls.
> L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of
> magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.
>

What's that? I can't hear you over the 800Gbps of traffic we're able
to generate with FreeBSD but not Linux...  In all fairness, Linux does
a better job at moving lots of packets...

My daily driver is MacOS for work. And FreeBSD laptop for personal. There
are problems
with FreeBSD (I'm looking at you wifi), but it works great. The Graphics
issues
have been solved, by and large.

Warner

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Marc Donner]

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Let me remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 9:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> > You like that abomination known as "systemd"?
>
> No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it.  Which is almost
> never.  Not a fan.
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Larry McVoy]

> You like that abomination known as "systemd"?  

No, I intensely dislike it when I have to deal with it.  Which is almost
never.  Not a fan.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2024, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> You like that abomination known as "systemd"?

Call me weird, but I still think the proper init system for any Linux 
distro should still and always be sysvinit or something else of that ilk.

Too many people creating or maintaining Linux distros don't understand 
what Linux is, or WHY Linux is.

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024, Larry McVoy wrote:

> So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1, 
> really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.

SunOS 4.1.4: pure bliss...  But we know what happened next :-(

> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while 
> back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I walked 
> the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand if you have 
> installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI" for partitioning the 
> disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience is _awful_.

Well, OK, in approx order :-)

    As a FreeBSD nut, consider yourself asked...

    User since, oh, when BSD/OS got borged, I guess.

    And I've seen worse UIs...  Mind you, that SunOS installer was great!

Now, hands up all those who partially overlapped root with swap etc (on 
any *nix box)...

> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead it 
> is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example from 
> more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the machine I 
> was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was graphical and 
> it was just easier to tab through the options than go find a mouse.

You like that abomination known as "systemd"?  As for mice, I always kept 
a couple in the drawer (serial, RF, etc).

> I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better. 
> Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls. 
> L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of 
> magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.

I'm typing this on a Mac 8GB laptop, into my FreeBSD 512MB (yes) server 
(it works; I can't afford anything better on my pension).

Oh, I've also used OpenBSD, but since you practically need permission to 
even fart then I'd only recommend it as a firewall.

It's all abut horses for courses: OpenBSD for a firewall, FreeBSD for its 
amazing ports, NetBSD to run on weird hardware, and a Mac for fun :-)

The only reason that I have a Penguin (if I can just revive it) was to run 
stuff that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere; I haven't missed it...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Luther Johnson]

Oops, wrong thread, sorry.

On 03/07/2024 08:57 PM, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I believe the first Minix C compilers were based on the Amsterdam
> Compiler Kit, so that's another early source.
>
> On 03/07/2024 08:42 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
>>>> What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
>>>> itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
>>>> OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
>>>> minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
>>>> tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
>>>>
>>>> -Ben
>>> The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
>>> KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. ??Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. ??My
>>> wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
>>> that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
>>> ??I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
>>> Windows 7. ??All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
>>> to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
>>>
>>> As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
>>> just for kicks. ??It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
>>> storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. ??I
>>> just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
>>> from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
>>> FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.
>> So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1,
>> really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.
>>
>> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while
>> back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I
>> walked the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand
>> if you have installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI"
>> for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience
>> is _awful_.
>>
>> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead
>> it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example
>> from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the
>> machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was
>> graphical and it was just easier to tab through the options than go
>> find a mouse.
>>
>> I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better.
>> Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls.
>> L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of
>> magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.
>

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Luther Johnson]

I believe the first Minix C compilers were based on the Amsterdam
Compiler Kit, so that's another early source.

On 03/07/2024 08:42 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
>> On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
>>> What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
>>> itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
>>> OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
>>> minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
>>> tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
>>>
>>> -Ben
>> The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
>> KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. ??Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. ??My
>> wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
>> that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
>> ??I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
>> Windows 7. ??All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
>> to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
>>
>> As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
>> just for kicks. ??It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
>> storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. ??I
>> just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
>> from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
>> FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.
> So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1,
> really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.
>
> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while
> back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I
> walked the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand
> if you have installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI"
> for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience
> is _awful_.
>
> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead
> it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example
> from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the
> machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was
> graphical and it was just easier to tab through the options than go
> find a mouse.
>
> I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better.
> Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls.
> L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of
> magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
> > What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
> > itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
> > OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
> > minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
> > tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
> > 
> > -Ben
> 
> The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
> KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. ??Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. ??My
> wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
> that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
> ??I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
> Windows 7. ??All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
> to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
> 
> As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
> just for kicks. ??It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
> storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. ??I
> just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
> from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
> FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.

So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1,
really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.

FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while
back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I 
walked the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand
if you have installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI"
for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience
is _awful_.

SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead
it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example
from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the 
machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was
graphical and it was just easier to tab through the options than go
find a mouse.

I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better.
Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls.
L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of
magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Jeffry R. Abramson]

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On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
> What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
> itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
> OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
> minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
> tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
> 
> -Ben

The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon.  Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use.  My
wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
 I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
Windows 7.  All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.

As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
just for kicks.  It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty.  I
just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.

Jeff

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Will Senn]

Started with MS-DOS 3.10b and some version of CP/M on a DEC Rainbow 100. 
Then more DOS and Windows. A bit of Linux in 1992/1993 (prior to the 1.0 
kernel) - first Unix exposure. Then Windows and Linux (every so now and 
again) until 2005 when I went Mac full tilt. I would have stayed Mac, 
but man they're expensive and I so rarely have enough cash laying around 
to buy replacements. In 2008, I started using FreeBSD for SCM and other 
services and what with ZFS, it would have been nirvana, but the UI... 
When my 2012 MacBook Pro died, I almost cried... but I didn't replace 
it. Instead, I got a 10 year old IBM ThinkCentre m92p on ebay for $75 
w/32GB of RAM and a fast Quad Processor and I ran Linux Mint on it for a 
year and after getting critical mass on things, thought I would make the 
switch to FreeBSD for everything, but that UI... and the fact that this 
program required Linux compatibility, that one wouldn't run, and so 
on... I've recently switched back to Mint and things are just... better. 
I miss boot environments and systemd's a travesty, but, stuff just 
working is pretty cool.

Mint just works - it sooooo reminds me of Mac in that regard - darn near 
every application on the planet will run on it, if it's *nix friendly at 
all (and my one gotta have app - Acrobat Pro X, runs great under wine  - 
as do Minitab 16, Notepad++, Mavis Beacon, etc). I tried MX for a while 
cuz it's a pretty Debian, but Mint's got MX beat for ease of running 
stuff. Cinnamon as delivered on Mint is pretty seamless. Stuff like 
audio video apps work, the music player integrates so that when it's 
playing Cinnamon knows and stuff...

Also, and apropos to the list, I can emulate any machine known to 
mankind, so far as I know. Yesterday I booted my Windows 3.11 instance 
and did some assembly stuff... simh, yup, Mips, yup, Commodore, yup, 
Apple IIe, yup :). Big fan.

Will

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Mike Markowski]

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On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 1:57 AM Jeffry R. Abramson <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> ...Thinking of looking for something
> simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their
> primary home computing needs?
>
> Jeff
>

Jeff and all,

We started with FreeBSD in 1992 soon after getting married.  My wife is a
computer scientist (I'm EE) and we loaded 3.5" diskette after diskette and
then she worked on finding a graphics card driver. :-)  In more recent
times we ran gentoo but that was ordeal to keep up to date.  Like a water
cooled VW, tinkering is almost a daily requirement.  In recent years we use
Ubuntu distribution and enjoy it.  My wife likes the ease of maintenance
and as an RF engr I enjoy the ease of acquiring tools, including
compilers.  Thanks, Clem, for pointing me to ifort a year or two ago!
(1968 F-IV RF propagation code revived at https://udel.edu/~mm/itm/ in the
retro computing section.)

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

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Luther Johnson]

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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 <mailto: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
>
>


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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Åke Nordin]

On 2024-03-07 07:47, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
> simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their
> primary home computing needs?

Primarily OpenBSD. Some Raspberry Pi still runs their (Debian-based IIRC) Linux.
The people that pay me so I can buy toys make me run Ubuntu LTS. Since I still
need to work, that is what I use the most, but I can't say I'm particularly
delighted by it.

The reason for OpenBSD is primarily that I'm lazy, as it tends to Just Work(tm).
Especially on the thinkpads that I happen to favor. I used to know a few of their
devs, so it was easy for me to begin using it.

-- 
Åke Nordin <ake.nordin@netia.se>, resident Net/Lunix/telecom geek.
Netia Data AB, Stockholm SWEDEN *46#7O466OI99#

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Adam Thornton]

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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
>
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Dave Horsfall]

Started off with CP/M, then switched to BSD/OS (giving Windoze a miss) 
when I decided that I wanted a Unix box at home.

When WinDriver bought them and shut them down, I switched to FreeBSD 
(which is still my server); I use an old MacBook Pro for web/graphics/etc, 
with multiple SSH windows into the server.

No time for Penguin/OS; I don't like the way that it shoves all 3rd-party 
stuff into /usr/bin etc (those are system directories, but is typical of 
the rank amateurism of penguins), nor the attitude of the users who deny 
the very existence of non-Penguin POSIX systems that were around for 
decades beforehand.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Marc Rochkind]

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Minor correction to Thomas (but nothing is too minor for this list ;-) ):

Chromebooks run ChromeOS, undoubtedly based on some form of Linux, as is
Android.

Marc

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 9:33 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> my user-facing system is OSX on an m2, 96 G DRAM, 4T SSD. I have a
> system76, 40G DRAM, 4T NVME running linux for things needing linux. I have
> a USB Armory, 512M, running either a small Debian distro or Go on bare
> metal with Tamago. I have several systems that run TinyGo on bare metal.
>
> I have a boatload of IoT under development, nowadays, all RISC-V. They run
> a cut-down Linux with ONE init process, written in Go, that implements a
> version of the Plan 9 cpu command, called sidecore (
> github.com/u-root/sidecore, first talk to be presented next month). As a
> result, most of the systems I have can run any distro I want, on a
> per-command basis, so in most cases the distro I run is called "make your
> choice". I can run any distro I want, with $HOME coming from $HOME, from
> OSX or Linux, and It Just Works. You Plan 9 folks have some idea what I
> mean, although sidecore actually does more.
>
> WIth Go and Rust, distros matter much less. Most C nowadays is not written
> in a portable way anyways -- see a bit of the full sad story here:
> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d0yK7g-J6oITgE-B_odadSw3nlBWGbMK7clt_TmXo7c/edit?usp=sharing
> -- so I've largely stopped using C at all. That, in turn, affects which
> systems I use for interactive work.
>
> So I guess the answer, in my case, is "whatever I need at the moment" --
> since my UI is OSX, my build systems are OSX and Ubuntu, and my IoT are, on
> a command-by-command basis, "it depends."
>
> cpu (and sidecore) is one of  those Plan 9 commands I could not live
> without, and Go made it possible to have it everywhere. It's even got an
> IANA number since last year -- 17010.
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:13 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To my way of thinking, the OS itself matters only if you're developing or
>> supporting the OS, or doing development for that OS. Otherwise, the
>> overwhelming criteria are what applications are available. I use Adobe
>> Lightroom and Photoshop for my photography, and those are available only
>> for MacOS and Windows. Because of very bad experiences with Apple as a
>> developer of apps for the iPhone, I don't like anything Apple, so I use
>> Windows for my desktop and laptop, and an Android phone.
>>
>> I often hear that there are Open Source equivalents for Lightroom and
>> Photoshop, but the people saying that aren't serious photographers.
>>
>> If you don't require any particular applications, then, as I said, the OS
>> doesn't matter, so Linux and FreeBSD  are fine choices. I've long been
>> impressed with how usable distros like Ubuntu have become over the years.
>>
>> On rare occasions, I need to run a UNIX/Linux program, and for that I
>> used to use the MacOS command line back when I used a Mac, and now use
>> Windows System for Linux, which runs Ubuntu.
>>
>> (Like everything else posted here, these are my opinions, likely not
>> anyone else's.)
>>
>> Marc Rochkind
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:52 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Like Marc Donner, my primary system, UNIX or otherwise, in which I'm
>>> typing this message, is a current late model MacPro (arm/Sonoma) - which I
>>> switched to Apple's UNIX flavor about 20+ years ago and have yet to look
>>> back. That said, I have almost every OS that runs on x86 from different
>>> Linux flavors and BSDs, plus lots of different I/O controllers for
>>> conversion in my basement.   Further, I also have a number of historical
>>> (non-Intel or Arm-based) computers on my different ethernets.   FWIW: I
>>> also have a ton of SCSI equipment that's either on a FreeBSD Box (most
>>> often), or I have a RATOC SCSI to USB2 controller cable that 'just works'
>>> on my Mac and/or any x86 laptop I have around.  It is known to talk to the
>>> disks as well as recently discussed Archive Viper QIC drives. That said,
>>> I've never tried the USB to SCSI cable with a Linux -- only MacOS and
>>> Winders (I never needed to use it with anything else).   Also, I have never
>>> tried that interface with 9-track, which is on the FreeBSD systems SCSI
>>> chain driven by an on-motherboard Adaptec PCI to SCSI. The only real issue
>>> I have had trying to use SCSI peripherals with MacOS is that traditional
>>> BSD <sys/mtio.h> is not included in the last N versions of the Apple
>>> developers tool kit, making a compilation of old tape-based C code a PITA.
>>> Still, if you install the controller and can manage to rebuild -- it all
>>> seems to work fine.
>>>
>>> Clem
>>> ᐧ
>>> ᐧ
>>> ᐧ
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*
>>
>

-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[ron minnich]

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my user-facing system is OSX on an m2, 96 G DRAM, 4T SSD. I have a
system76, 40G DRAM, 4T NVME running linux for things needing linux. I have
a USB Armory, 512M, running either a small Debian distro or Go on bare
metal with Tamago. I have several systems that run TinyGo on bare metal.

I have a boatload of IoT under development, nowadays, all RISC-V. They run
a cut-down Linux with ONE init process, written in Go, that implements a
version of the Plan 9 cpu command, called sidecore (
github.com/u-root/sidecore, first talk to be presented next month). As a
result, most of the systems I have can run any distro I want, on a
per-command basis, so in most cases the distro I run is called "make your
choice". I can run any distro I want, with $HOME coming from $HOME, from
OSX or Linux, and It Just Works. You Plan 9 folks have some idea what I
mean, although sidecore actually does more.

WIth Go and Rust, distros matter much less. Most C nowadays is not written
in a portable way anyways -- see a bit of the full sad story here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d0yK7g-J6oITgE-B_odadSw3nlBWGbMK7clt_TmXo7c/edit?usp=sharing
-- so I've largely stopped using C at all. That, in turn, affects which
systems I use for interactive work.

So I guess the answer, in my case, is "whatever I need at the moment" --
since my UI is OSX, my build systems are OSX and Ubuntu, and my IoT are, on
a command-by-command basis, "it depends."

cpu (and sidecore) is one of  those Plan 9 commands I could not live
without, and Go made it possible to have it everywhere. It's even got an
IANA number since last year -- 17010.

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:13 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> To my way of thinking, the OS itself matters only if you're developing or
> supporting the OS, or doing development for that OS. Otherwise, the
> overwhelming criteria are what applications are available. I use Adobe
> Lightroom and Photoshop for my photography, and those are available only
> for MacOS and Windows. Because of very bad experiences with Apple as a
> developer of apps for the iPhone, I don't like anything Apple, so I use
> Windows for my desktop and laptop, and an Android phone.
>
> I often hear that there are Open Source equivalents for Lightroom and
> Photoshop, but the people saying that aren't serious photographers.
>
> If you don't require any particular applications, then, as I said, the OS
> doesn't matter, so Linux and FreeBSD  are fine choices. I've long been
> impressed with how usable distros like Ubuntu have become over the years.
>
> On rare occasions, I need to run a UNIX/Linux program, and for that I used
> to use the MacOS command line back when I used a Mac, and now use Windows
> System for Linux, which runs Ubuntu.
>
> (Like everything else posted here, these are my opinions, likely not
> anyone else's.)
>
> Marc Rochkind
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:52 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Like Marc Donner, my primary system, UNIX or otherwise, in which I'm
>> typing this message, is a current late model MacPro (arm/Sonoma) - which I
>> switched to Apple's UNIX flavor about 20+ years ago and have yet to look
>> back. That said, I have almost every OS that runs on x86 from different
>> Linux flavors and BSDs, plus lots of different I/O controllers for
>> conversion in my basement.   Further, I also have a number of historical
>> (non-Intel or Arm-based) computers on my different ethernets.   FWIW: I
>> also have a ton of SCSI equipment that's either on a FreeBSD Box (most
>> often), or I have a RATOC SCSI to USB2 controller cable that 'just works'
>> on my Mac and/or any x86 laptop I have around.  It is known to talk to the
>> disks as well as recently discussed Archive Viper QIC drives. That said,
>> I've never tried the USB to SCSI cable with a Linux -- only MacOS and
>> Winders (I never needed to use it with anything else).   Also, I have never
>> tried that interface with 9-track, which is on the FreeBSD systems SCSI
>> chain driven by an on-motherboard Adaptec PCI to SCSI. The only real issue
>> I have had trying to use SCSI peripherals with MacOS is that traditional
>> BSD <sys/mtio.h> is not included in the last N versions of the Apple
>> developers tool kit, making a compilation of old tape-based C code a PITA.
>> Still, if you install the controller and can manage to rebuild -- it all
>> seems to work fine.
>>
>> Clem
>> ᐧ
>> ᐧ
>> ᐧ
>>
>
>
> --
> *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Marc Rochkind]

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To my way of thinking, the OS itself matters only if you're developing or
supporting the OS, or doing development for that OS. Otherwise, the
overwhelming criteria are what applications are available. I use Adobe
Lightroom and Photoshop for my photography, and those are available only
for MacOS and Windows. Because of very bad experiences with Apple as a
developer of apps for the iPhone, I don't like anything Apple, so I use
Windows for my desktop and laptop, and an Android phone.

I often hear that there are Open Source equivalents for Lightroom and
Photoshop, but the people saying that aren't serious photographers.

If you don't require any particular applications, then, as I said, the OS
doesn't matter, so Linux and FreeBSD  are fine choices. I've long been
impressed with how usable distros like Ubuntu have become over the years.

On rare occasions, I need to run a UNIX/Linux program, and for that I used
to use the MacOS command line back when I used a Mac, and now use Windows
System for Linux, which runs Ubuntu.

(Like everything else posted here, these are my opinions, likely not anyone
else's.)

Marc Rochkind

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:52 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Like Marc Donner, my primary system, UNIX or otherwise, in which I'm
> typing this message, is a current late model MacPro (arm/Sonoma) - which I
> switched to Apple's UNIX flavor about 20+ years ago and have yet to look
> back. That said, I have almost every OS that runs on x86 from different
> Linux flavors and BSDs, plus lots of different I/O controllers for
> conversion in my basement.   Further, I also have a number of historical
> (non-Intel or Arm-based) computers on my different ethernets.   FWIW: I
> also have a ton of SCSI equipment that's either on a FreeBSD Box (most
> often), or I have a RATOC SCSI to USB2 controller cable that 'just works'
> on my Mac and/or any x86 laptop I have around.  It is known to talk to the
> disks as well as recently discussed Archive Viper QIC drives. That said,
> I've never tried the USB to SCSI cable with a Linux -- only MacOS and
> Winders (I never needed to use it with anything else).   Also, I have never
> tried that interface with 9-track, which is on the FreeBSD systems SCSI
> chain driven by an on-motherboard Adaptec PCI to SCSI. The only real issue
> I have had trying to use SCSI peripherals with MacOS is that traditional
> BSD <sys/mtio.h> is not included in the last N versions of the Apple
> developers tool kit, making a compilation of old tape-based C code a PITA.
> Still, if you install the controller and can manage to rebuild -- it all
> seems to work fine.
>
> Clem
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>


-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Jim Capp]

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Hi Folks, 


I cut my UNIX teeth on Xenix in the early 80's and have been using some flavor of *nix ever since. I'm a CLI guy and we run hundreds of Linux vm hosts and guests at work. I've steered clear of M$oft for nearly my entire career. 


I weaned my wife off of M$oft 20 years ago and just recently moved her from Linux to an iMac. 


When I'm at home, its MacOS. 


$.02 


Jim 







From: "Jeffry R. Abramson" <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com> 
To: tuhs@tuhs.org 
Sent: Thursday, March 7, 2024 1:47:26 AM 
Subject: [TUHS] What do you currently use for your primary OS at home? 

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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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Thomas Kellar]

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Hopefully people are not getting tired of this:

Desktop is a 10 year old Dell running Windows 10 with Cygwin for access to
servers
Plus Old Chromebook which, I guess is an Android  OS
Servers are ALL Ubuntu.  (Intel and AMD cores)
Raspbian OS in Raspberry pis. I think that is Debian derived.

As am ex-sysadmin I love command line stuff

Thomas

ᐧ
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Clem Cole]

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Like Marc Donner, my primary system, UNIX or otherwise, in which I'm typing
this message, is a current late model MacPro (arm/Sonoma) - which I
switched to Apple's UNIX flavor about 20+ years ago and have yet to look
back. That said, I have almost every OS that runs on x86 from different
Linux flavors and BSDs, plus lots of different I/O controllers for
conversion in my basement.   Further, I also have a number of historical
(non-Intel or Arm-based) computers on my different ethernets.   FWIW: I
also have a ton of SCSI equipment that's either on a FreeBSD Box (most
often), or I have a RATOC SCSI to USB2 controller cable that 'just works'
on my Mac and/or any x86 laptop I have around.  It is known to talk to the
disks as well as recently discussed Archive Viper QIC drives. That said,
I've never tried the USB to SCSI cable with a Linux -- only MacOS and
Winders (I never needed to use it with anything else).   Also, I have never
tried that interface with 9-track, which is on the FreeBSD systems SCSI
chain driven by an on-motherboard Adaptec PCI to SCSI. The only real issue
I have had trying to use SCSI peripherals with MacOS is that traditional
BSD <sys/mtio.h> is not included in the last N versions of the Apple
developers tool kit, making a compilation of old tape-based C code a PITA.
Still, if you install the controller and can manage to rebuild -- it all
seems to work fine.

Clem
ᐧ
ᐧ
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Michael Usher via TUHS]

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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

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Steve Nickolas]

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.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Larry McVoy]

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

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Brantley Coile]

Primarily Plan 9. Currently using Mac OS X to run drawterm. I removed VGA
from Plan 9 years ago. I'll be adding it back at some point, after
which I'll switch mostly over to a Plan 9 terminal.

But we also run almost everything else for testing.

Brantley

> On Mar 7, 2024, at 1:47 AM, 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
> 
> 

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Is this topic more suitable for the sibling COFF list?
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Ben Kallus]

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What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel itself,
or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former, OpenBSD may be a
good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a minimal distribution
(e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a tiling window manager
(e.g. Sway, dwm).

-Ben

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Marc Donner]

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For day-to-day (email, web, blah blah) I keep a relatively current MacOS
box.  In addition I keep a ‘toy data center’ - a set of four NUC machines
running Ubuntu on which I keep my various system management projects and
development projects.  They are all headless, so I have a small hdmi
display I plug in when I need to do release upgrades and other tasks that
require a ‘console’.
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 4:10 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> "Jeffry R. Abramson" <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering what
> > do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?
>
> I run Ubuntu Mate.  All the nice features of Ubuntu, plus a more
> normal UI and everything just works.  In particular it handles
> current hardware (laptops, wifi, etc) fine, as well as knowing about
> network printers, generally without problems. I work with a bunch
> of terminal windows with Bash and gvim for editing, evince for viewing
> PDFs and a web browser.
>
> If you want a more do-it-yourself kind of feel, you might try some
> variant of Plan 9; the 9front fork is the most actively developed.
> Plan 9 has ben on my to-do list for a few decades now; maybe once
> I retire I'll actually get to it. :-) Be forewarned that there's
> a learning curve there, Plan 9 is most definitely NOT Unix.
>
> HTH,
>
> Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[arnold]

"Jeffry R. Abramson" <jeffryrabramson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering what
> do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?

I run Ubuntu Mate.  All the nice features of Ubuntu, plus a more
normal UI and everything just works.  In particular it handles
current hardware (laptops, wifi, etc) fine, as well as knowing about
network printers, generally without problems. I work with a bunch
of terminal windows with Bash and gvim for editing, evince for viewing
PDFs and a web browser.

If you want a more do-it-yourself kind of feel, you might try some
variant of Plan 9; the 9front fork is the most actively developed.
Plan 9 has ben on my to-do list for a few decades now; maybe once
I retire I'll actually get to it. :-) Be forewarned that there's
a learning curve there, Plan 9 is most definitely NOT Unix.

HTH,

Arnold