At home I use Debian GNU/Linux exclusively. With just a tiling window manager (i3 or sway). I have toyed with other stuff:

alpinelinux --- this is imho very nice, it is much smaller. I can have a system without python and perl if I wish :-)
openbsd --- that is still useful, but I find it a bit too uncomfortable.
genode/SculptOS --- a system that acts like a hypervisor. It forces accounting of resources to every process. In spawning a process I have to give up some of my share. Very interesting idea.

I absolutely need to have emacs and bash running, everything else is a second thought.

At dayjob I have to deal with windows10 and I hate it. But then --- right after DOS I went for IBM mainframes and DEC/VMS equipment, several Unix flavours. I sort of skipped Windows. I never got the hang of it and I honestly don't miss it.

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~canaryjacket wrote:

Honestly, both OpenBSD and Genode seem like academic solutions looking for real-world problems. For non-desktop deployments, Linux seems to be the clear winner.

What can you do with OpenBSD and Genode that you can't do with Linux (in real-world applications)?

Alpine is certainly a nice base for Docker images.

I'm jealous of your time with VMS, but at the end of the day, operating systems are tools, not toys.

~inquiry wrote:

My too on the IBM mainframes, veritable eons ago. Thinking about it has me wanting to look up pictures of ISPF/PDF screens on MVS/TSO, and CMS (?) on VM.