Rubenerd

A question from Mark C. in email this morning, among all the rude explanations about what .gitignore files are:

What percentage of time do you spend on your computers? Is it Linux mostly and some Mac? What makes you choose one over the other? Love your blog!

Thank you! I needed that :).

It’s interesting how computers and our perceptions have changed over time. I mostly used Mac laptops and Windows desktops growing up, because the Mac was the fun tool with good Wi-Fi, and Windows was for the serious desktop machine. Thesedays the Mac is my work machine, and the fun desktop at home runs FreeBSD and Linux.

I only arrived back on the Linux desktop recently in the context of games, thanks to all the work Valve and Wine have put into Windows compatibility (though I’ve since switched back to Fedora Workstation). Otherwise it’s FreeBSD and NetBSD, the former because the tooling is awesome and I prefer OpenZFS, and the latter because I still harbour a soft spot for its clean design and community.

For the sake of completeness, my vintage machines run a combination of old, pointless OSs like DOS, Windows for Workgroups, and Commodore Basic. My aim is to eventually have my childhood Pentium 1 also booting BeOS and OS/2, but they’ve proven more challenging than I expected with my IDE to CF adaptors, and even my new SCSI to SD.

I’m not sure what exact ratios each OS would have, but I’ll bet if I added all those up as percentages, I’d get 100 :).