What is your OS of choice for personal use?

Also feel free to comment why, will be interesting to see :slight_smile:

  • macOS
  • Windows
  • Linux (comment which distro)
0 voters
1 Like

I’ve always loved Mac, it just works and working in IT for almost 20 years, that’s how I want my personal devices to run. Also have a Windows rig for gaming.

2 Likes

I personally run MacOS for my daily driving machines. Then all of my virtual machines are almost always ubuntu 20.04 server LTS.

But every now and again if I need a VM with a user interface I will use windows. For example where I live now the max upload speed I can get is 40mbit, which is 1/50th the speed I had with fiber. Video uploads take ~30-45 min sometimes! To get around this I have a windows VM that has the NAS mounted and I RDP into it and upload from there!

Windows for gaming and business-related stuff. MacOS for theatre-related stuff, especially QLab. Linux or other Multix derivatives for everything else these days. FreeRTOS for IOT and hobby stuff.

Some days I get nostalgic for the permission model of WangVS where a program could be granted permission that the user might not directly have, or the versioning file system of VAX VMS, or the throughput of OS/360. System/38 was ok but AS/400 was better, the circular queue file of HP3000 was
great for data collection but programming in paper tape was a pain.

2 Likes

Wow, programming in paper tape, is that like the old punch card programming?

1 Like

Yup. The only difference was it was continuous loop instead of a stack of cards. One of my jobs in high school was picking up cards from all the schools in town and taking them to the school board office. We’ve come along way from pencils and card sorters. ChatGPT drafted my latest project this afternoon, along with instructions for setting up the test environment using vagrant and ansible. It’s a shame the AI is stuck with a 2021 data set though. Every answer references obsolete examples.

That’s enough thread hijacking for today.

2 Likes

While I daily drive both a mac for personal, work has me on a windows machine. I have a bunch of baremetal unix/linux installs that I get to lab with.

2 Likes

In business before retirement I used Windoze (as did the majority of my Client base) developing accounting software on a 4GL platform. Since retiring, I can no longer afford to plug and play all day so have switched completely to Ubuntu (Linux) which I find much less frustrating with its complete array of FOSS to choose from - much of which is every bit as good as the commercial stuff on offer for Windoze but of course free.

2 Likes

I have been thinking about daily driving Ubuntu! Most programs and work I do at this point (other than editing YouTube videos) is through a web browser anyway! Plus the ram usage compared to Mac or windows is insanely low.

Have you had issues with driver support?

1 Like

Not at all @Will. My rig is very simple as you can see and there is a wealth of support for Ubuntu from ask ubuntu and also from YT contributors such as Jay La Croix with his LearnLinuxTV channel. I think you two would get on great together :wink:

2 Likes

I would say ‘punch cards’ is an solid answer to “what operating system did you run”

Learn Linux TV is still a channel I throw on in the background when I am not doing anything. jay is awesome!

1 Like

Our house is a bit bi-polar, wife and I are exclusive Windows, because that is what we grew up with and is the workplace standard. The kids are all Apple devices, because that is what they are growing up with and is the school standard. It all surprisingly seems to work quite well. Although the Apple OS ecosystem can sometimes drive my Windows-Brain crazy! Fortunately, I live in California in Silicon Valley and have plenty of Apple Execs as neighbors who are at the ready to help…and teasingly try to proselytize me as to the Apple superiority over Windows. Although they do tell me they run a virtual machine for Windows in their Mac. So go figure…

2 Likes

Oh those were the times. I came over two used AS 400 and ran them in a tiny room in an apartment. It was so hot in there we used the room for drying clothes :smile:

At the time the the electricity was super cheap, but not for me, the bills I got :sweat_smile:

But what cool machines, I really like playing with old tech that were way out of reach for normal people at the time.

1 Like

I had an original Macintosh from '84 in mint condition that still booted and my mother thought it was junked and threw it out. Could’ve killed her lol.

Now I’ve got a 2004 Mirrored Drive Doors with Dual 1.25GHz G4 CPUs that still runs (Can’t stream a YouTube video higher than 420p which is insane) and I’ve got a Dual Graphic Trash Can Mac Pro too.

Mint Mac from 84! :open_mouth:

Your mom must feel so bad for it now :frowning:
the trashcan looks very cool, and boy did I want one back in the day :drooling_face:

Lol yeah, i still make remarks from time to time to tease her. When I showed her an eBay listing for one similar but it didn’t boot she almost died at the price and could t believe what she took to the dump.

Yeah, my all the fav design is the mirror drive G4 PowerMac, just such a great design, and then the Trashcan.

The G4 iMac with the LCD on the swivel was my favourite iMac design.

The Mac I’ve always hated, the eMac. Dumbest design. Weigh a tonne and no way to move it with just bear hugging it. The iMac G3 at least had the handle.

This thread is going to cost me way too much money as now I just want to pickup all of this stuff and be a able to run with it!

1 Like

It goes back to 1985 when we got an IBM PCjr running PC-DOS 2.1. I just grew up with DOS and in the mid-90 was dragged kicking and screaming into Windows 3.1 because the income tax software my father was using had a name change and became a Win16 application. I’ve also had computers running Windows 2000, Windows Vista (ugh, it didn’t have Win 2000 drivers so I could downgrade it), and Windows 7. I am just about done reinstalling those Win7 machines with Windows 10 and using it in production. Sad thing is that Windows Update tells me they cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. For one, they do not have a TPM but I understand there are workarounds.

With all this, I have not had time to explore Linux much more than trying out a live CD. As for Macs, they have the same issue Linux has in that they do not have equivalents to the business software I use, such as QuickBooks, CaseWare, and professional income tax software.

1 Like

I gave up on plug and play all day windoze and moved totally over to Ubuntu Linux.
It will certainly be worth investing your time on a Linux desktop distro of choice - the rime saved by not having to constantly re-install windoze will leave you with much more time on your hands for the simple pleasures and exploring FOSS :wink: