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

[Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co>]

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.