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

[Jeffry R. Abramson]

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