Thursday, January 11th, 2018
On operating systems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's recapitulate:
- Jirka[1] is a SGI Irix and Ubuntu user (depending on the device)
- Solderpunk is a NetBSD and Debian user[2]
- pet84rik[3] is a OpenBSD user (and various Solaris flavors, Fedora,
before that Ubuntu and before that Debian)
- Peter @ uninformativ.de prefers Arch Linux over everything else[4]
Now I feel like I have to categorize myself as well. But it will be
better to draw it for you:
|
| ZX Spectrum
1995 | |
| MS-DOS
| |
| Windows 95
| |----------->Red Hat
2000 | Windows 98 |
| | Mandrake
| Windows ME----------+------->Macintosh System 7.1
| | Slackware |
| X | Mac OS 9.2
2005 | Debian------------+------------>FreeBSD
| | Mac OS X 10.4
| SourceMage |
| | |
| Xubuntu Mac OS X 10.5
2010 | | |
| Debian |------------->NetBSD
| | | |
| Linux Mint<------| | |
| | | | OpenBSD
2015 | Slackware | | |
| | X | |
| | Mac OS X 10.6 NetBSD
| | | |
As you can see, it's not simple. I use quite a lot of machines at the
same time and I prefer to use on every computer the best option
available.
I use Slackware Linux on my 10" Atom-based netbook, because neither
OpenBSD nor NetBSD worked on that machine and I prefer the good old
ways Linux distributions were made in 90's over anything modern.
I use Mac OS X 10.6 on my MacBook 2006, because no newer version
works on it and after eight years on PowerMac G5 the machine is still
fast enough for me, at least for the couple of following months (at
least until it's clear which of Intel CPUs will get the Spectre bug
fixed, then I'll look for some second-hand MacBook Pro).
And I use NetBSD, because the PC I built from spare parts, doesn't
boot anything else (AMD64 from cca 2004, Matrox VGA, SATA, SCSI, IDE
disks and drives). At the moment it's not clear, how long will I even
have the machine, as its only purpose is to collect and sort data from
all my computers on it and then get rid of all the unnecessary
hardware, because I really hoarded quite a lot of it.
So no fanboyism here. Whatever is unix-like and has a good shell can
be used and is good for me. It wasn't always so, but during the last
twenty years I learned some important lessons and now I'm happily
multi-platform. The fact that I use mostly old and obscure hardware
is a different story.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org/g/users/jirka/Phlog/indigo-www.gif
[2]
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/on-devils-and-bentos.txt
[3]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/pet84rik/BLOG/JAN18/Jan04-01
[4]
gopher://uninformativ.de:70/0/about-me/software.txt