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 > > >