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