Tfurrows[0] writes of using a 8088 to browse gopher. How frigan cool is that? Gopher did not exist when the IBM XT was my primary computer so I never got to experience gopher in DOS. My first experience was on a Mac LCII running system 7 and TurboGopher. Even then (1993/94) the image of the web with inline images (although I had to view jpegs in a helper app that decompressed them) was sexier. Seventeen year old me did not appreciate text. I did not utilize my XT for anything really nifty except maybe BBS's. Mostly I just stayed in BASICA.
Pet84rik[1] writes of the OS selection on his Lenovo T420. I would love to mess around with other BSDs. I use FreeBSD on my main PC which happens to be a Raspberry Pi. The aarch64 architecture precludes any other BSD for now. Maybe I'll dust off my laptop and format it... After running BSD, Arch seems blah. It may boild down to the fact that I have too many damned devices and hop around too much between them. Tablets, ssh, and VNC make it possible to not care if you drop your computer in the bath water. It has been a while since I was personally invested in any device. Git, syncthing, and stow have made all my machines the same. The internet has made me want to get a thinkpad. I remember in the 90s thinking they were ugly and lusting after a small form factor Sony instead. The arguments for them are pretty compelling though.