When I built my first PC back in 1994 or-so, it was the only computer I had apart from the Amiga 500 which it was going to supplant (and the PC wasn’t even built); web was in its infancy and I remember having to rely on physically printed books and magazines to guide me through the process - and at one stage when I got very stuck and frustrated, I telephoned a friend - on a landline! I smile thinking of how technology was back then.
About a year later I did start dual-booting the above PC, which I had upgraded from Dos 6 and Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and the Linux distro was Slackware, with Lilo as the boot loader…
Nowadays if I’m tinkering with Linux I know I can hop onto the web to look for guidance on another device if I’m struggling with a machine. But imagine if it were our only machine?! I think having multiple devices available is also a good thing for the uptake of Linux
How many devices do you have, including tablets and smartphones, and which OSes do they run, I wonder?
I have three aged laptops of various screen sizes (~10 years or more) running Debian, one tablet and smartphone (couple of years old) running Android and a couple of newer PCs of various screen sizes (about three years old) running Windows 10 (when they work!)
Thanks for the feedback @minyaen - sounds like all those devices serve you well. I’ve not tried either Pop!_OS or Zorin but heard good things about them both
Not counting game consoles I have 3 devices.
Tower PC running on KDE neon.
Raspberry Pi 3, which currently isn’t used, but I’m planning to put something on it soon.
Phone: Nexus 5 with Lineage OS on it.
I also used to have a laptop, but gave it to my mother.
Thanks @Kikuchiyo. Have to say I’m impressed with the Lineage OS on your phone! I have only one smartphone and not really confident enough to displace Android from it for the moment
Wow. My wifi dashboard shows over 20 devices connected. I’m going to have to spend a day finding and documenting everything. I have too much stuff. I know I have a box of laptops powered off. I have a trashcan full of hard drives with various things on them. I have a bag of thumbdrives. I have more than one big book of CDs/DVDs of old OS install discs. Once I’ve had some time to do inventory, I’ll have to come back and post my list.
There are two options to run custom Android roms.
With Google ecosystem or degoogled. If you use the first one, experience will be pretty much identical to Android, except you have better updates and don’t have preinstalled crap from manufacturer.
DeGoogled approach is more tricky. Getting applications from Google store can be problematic, but I’m doing quite fine with F-droid. Still have some applications from Google store though.
Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop dual booting Ubuntu something and some other random distro
Dell Inspiron Gaming laptop with Windows 10 (my wife’s)
Custom Ryzen 7 2700x system running Kubuntu 19.04
6 Android devices including 2 Samsung Galaxy tablets, Galaxy S4, S5 and S7 phones and a OnePlus 5T (all stock)
An iPad
A Roku streaming stick
A Chromecast v2
A Synology DiskStation NAS
Raspberry Pi II B running Raspbian Lite with Pi-hole
So 14 active devices. I’ve got 3 or 4 old laptops that I’m going to donate to charity. I had a huge tech purge about a year ago where I got rid of a closet full of old tech I had been hording. It was necessary and I’m glad I did it although at the time it was difficult to sort through and decide what to keep.
Around 1990 I started with a 2nd hand Philips P3105 a XT clone with 760 KB of memory; a 20 MB HDD and a 2400 bps dial-up modem for a kind of MS-DOS based (pre-Internet) banking. It has been replaced in 1993 by a 486DX66 own build with 8 MB of memory and 200 MB IDE HDD. It did run Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and later Windows 95.
Since May I run my second own build, a Ryzen 3 2200G with 16 GB of memory and ~2 TB of storage; a SSD (128 GB) and 3 partly striped HDDs (320 (2.5") + 500 +1000 GB (both 3.5")). It runs Ubuntu 19.10 from ZFS all LZ4 compressed and most HDD partitions striped, except the 500 GB archives datapool on the 1 TB HDD.
In April I still did run 2008 HP dc5850 with a Phenom II X4 B97 (4 x 3.2 GHz), 8 GB of DDR2 and the same ~2TB of disks. That PC now runs leftovers; striped, LZ4 compressed SATA HDDs; 160 + 80 GB. It runs Ubuntu 19.04 from ZFS.
My backup server is a Pentium 4 HT (3.0 GHz), 1280 MB DDR and 3 striped, LZ4 compressed HDDs (SATA-1, 2.5" 320 GB + IDE 3.5" 250 GB + 320 GB) It runs FreeBSD-12 from ZFS too.
My laptop is a 14" HP Elitebook 8460p with a i5-2520m; 8 GB DDR3 and 1 TB SSHD. It runs Ubuntu Mate 19.10 from ZFS. Note that the LZ4 compression effectively almost doubles the Solid State Cache to ~15 GB.
My wife’s laptop is a 15" HP Elitebook 8540p with a i5-M560; 4 GB DDR3; Quadro NVS 5100M graphics and 256 GB HDD (7200 rpm). It runs Ubuntu 19.10 from ZFS.
I used to root/debloat/flash etc. on all my devices starting with the HTC Hero (man, what a process it was back then). Nowadays, the tech has made it extremely easy to get these tasks done. However, after doing it for so long, and experiencing (some) headaches it can cause, I went with the OnePlus line with their own Android experience (Oxygen). I still unlocked the bootloader, rooted, and played around with some ROMs, but ended up back with Oxygen OS due to the polish. I switch phones fairly regularly (annually to bi-annually). It’s great to be able to free the phone up, tinker, and see that there are some really creative minds out there customizing the Android experience!
Currently, I have three computers. One running Arch/Gentoo. One running alpine and one running windows 10. The windows machine only exists for modded Slime Rancher for my daughter. The mods work on Linux, but they cause so much lag since they’re obviously made for windows, it’s not worth dealing with for that one game.
I have a pixel XL3 running stock android from google fi. I plan on switching it to grapheneOS in the new year, but for now it’s pretty standard. That’s about it though. Not very exciting stuff I guess!
@TheLinuxNinja sounds like you’re spoilt for choice which is pretty good - I look forward to hearing more
@Kikuchiyo it’s really the non-Google option that attracts me. I know it’ll be much trickier, hence my not attempting it just yet
@EricAdams wow - you’re blessed with so much hardware, lucky you! Still waiting for news from anyone running vanilla Debian on a Pi, though I’m guessing that will have to be the Model 4?
@BertN45 that’s quite a little lot you have. I’m most impressed by your mastery of filesystems; I think striping is referring to RAID, too? Sounds fantastic, especially given your experience goes back to 1990. I think that was when I might have still been on my C64 or just upgraded to an Amiga 500. The first PC I built in approx 1994 used an AMD processor, DX2/55, 8MB with 512MB disk, running as you did, Dos 6 and Win 3.11 for workgroups. You’ve been trusting internet-type banking for decades, I notice!
Yes, striping is RAID-0. I striped all disks, that I had collected during the last 15 years.
Yes I never had problems with Internet banking. But nowadays to be more secure, I run Internet Banking and PayPal in a Ubuntu 16.04 Virtual Machine. That VM is exclusively used for that purpose and for nothing else and it is only “powered on” when needed and the firewall blocks all incoming connections.
I’m old now, so in 1990 I was 45 years. For a long time I did not want computers in the house, because since 1969 I worked every day for Philips in Computer and Software development.
@minyaen - that’s pretty brave of you! I’m on a low budget and have to be careful with my phone and therefore have never risked rooting or anything further. Yes, must be quite a luxury to have devices available to experiment with
@onesubtractone Sounds pretty good to me - doesn’t have to be hugely exciting as long as it’s functional in my opinion!
@RiderExMachina Impressive! I see you’re quite the Ubuntu fan from that little lot I can definitely vouch for the Motorola G series. I have a 4 Plus. It crashed totally on me once, about a year ago, but after recovery, no problems. I think it’s about three years old now! I think no-one on this family-friendly forum is a burglar, hopefully
@BernN45 My hat off to you, sir! You’re a veteran indeed and a very well-informed one, clearly I’d trust the VM for internet banking assuming it’s running on Linux but not on Windows. I prefer a short session of a secure production machine, log-on, run almost zero applications, shutdown.
Eh not really, I installed Ubuntu on my wife’s computers for its ease of use and administration, but my computers switch distros every few years. I was on Antergos for a few years, did a short stint with openSUSE, went all of last year with Fedora, and just recently put Ubuntu on because the Wine PPAs put out Wine updates faster than the Fedora repos.
1 mini-PC with pfSense, also used for OpenVPN to/from home.
3 mini-PCs with EndeavourOS, 2 for surfing and one Kodi-box for the TV.
1 gaming PC with Manjaro
1 tower thing with FreeNAS
1 tower thing with EOS for emulators etc. for the TV
1 tower thing with EOS that is used for downloading, mail etc. that I connect to from all the others via X2Go (I don’t sync my things in the cloud).
1 laptop with OpenSUSE TW.
1 laptop with EOS.
1 laptop with whatever distro I want to take a look at that week.
There a few other laptops and machines that gets used when I feel like it.
Edit: Sony ZX1 phone. Keeping it until I can get a pine or something.
Also a pi that is used as a table clock
Desktops:
1 tower with Win10 (Ryzen 1800x, 64GB RAM, 1080Ti) for video editing
1 tower with Win10 (i7-8700, 32GB RAM, GTX 1060) for my wife, gaming box
1 Intel NUC8i7HVK NUC, Win10. Hooked to the tv
1 tower Ryzen 2700, 64GB RAM, GTX1070 (changes Distro weekly as I try to find a stable OS to video edit on)
1 tower WAS running ProxMux with 64GB but the i7-4xxx finally died on me.
Laptops:
1 Lenovo SOMETHING laptop, wife’s (5-ish years old), Win10
1 Dell Latitude E7440, Ubuntu Mate
1 Dell Latitude E7450, Manjaro Cinnamon
1 2017 15" Macbook Pro (I have so many regrets)
1 Xaiomi Mi Notebook Pro running Pop_OS 19.10
1 Lenovo T440, Ubuntu 19.10
Mobile:
OnePlus 5T
OnePlus 7 Pro
Pixel C
iPhone 5S
iPhone 6S
iPhone SE (wife’s)
