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
>
>