So, what OS do you use? Do not reply if you use Windows, unless it's pre-xp.
I use slackware linux, and have tampered with NetBSD. I hate BSDs with a passion

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I use slackware, just to say im different.

The only machine I currently boot not-Windows on is a Raspberry Pi 4; this is almost entirely out of laziness.
My desktop would boot Linux if I didn't have an Nvidia card - things are apparently improving a lot on that front, but I want absolutely zero fiddling.

The Pi is boring and runs Pi OS, although heavily customized from the minimal image since I don't actually like most of the decisions the desktop image makes lol, and I use it a lot for media playback and webdev stuff.

I probably should boot some Linux distro on my laptop, I don't have nearly as much of a reason to keep it on Windows like my desktop.

I've used Linux as my daily driver on previous machines, usually Ubuntu back when that sucked less, then Debian, and I tried Fedora a few times and was reminded that everyone ships .DEBs but no one ships .RPMs for anything and the Fedora repo sucks ass.

I was going to buy a Rasberry Pi one day and say how crazily expensive they were. Is there really a point other than having another tiny computer for trivial tasks? If that's the case, I already have infinity computers stockpiled for servers that I can use.

>>6
There really isn't a point in getting a Pi these days.
The Pi 5 is heading into "just buy one of the myriad x86 mini-PCs on the market" territory and is VASTLY lower performance. Honestly, I really want to replace the Pi at some point (web browsing on it sucks ass right now - wasn't so bad years ago, but modern websites suck and running a modern browser also sucks on the fairly limp CPU), but I'm being cheap and a bunch of shit keeps coming up that demands money, so I haven't been able to justify the upgrade.

A fully loaded Pi 5 kit in the US is north of $100, and I can totally just get a used mini-PC with like 8x the speed instead.
My Pi 4 was like $60 with everything; board, case, power supply, shitty SD card. No keyboard/mouse, but I had one.
Anyone who bought one of the $180 kits I'm seeing is being fleeced and for $20 more, you can actually get a NEW x86 mini-PC, so the value proposition is not there at all.

The Pi made the mini-PC market explode, but now there are just way better options if you aren't doing something where the GPIO pins are useful... and if I'm completely honest, you might be in the market for the very cheap, easy to use bare-metal Pi Pico line instead in that case. I should buy more of those, they're dead useful. GP2040-CE is a wonderful bit of software, lets me make basically anything I want into a useful USB game controller.

I actually outright don't see a real use for getting a Pi 5 now, unless you really don't like x86, in which case most other ARM boards are shit - they're faster, but the level of software and hardware support isn't anywhere near what the Pi has; you don't want to run some shitty hacked up kernel from 4 years ago until the end of time and have an entire section of the board that still doesn't have drivers.
Some of that last bit is hyperbole, but not nearly as much as it should be.

>unless it's pre-XP
Okay but XP is literally the earliest you can go and still be secure out of the box. The lack of a firewall really hampers all the usability of previous Windows versions, especially since almost all 9x and NT4+ versions can be hacked with any unfiltered access to the internet.

>>8
your typical home router firewall will prevent the most obvious drive-by attacks
but I also remember that 9X/ME just have fewer services open vs NT/2K/XP to exploit too

really though, if you just put raw unfiltered internet into your system, especially one of that vintage, you absolutely deserve anything that happens
and if someone here is daily driving an old OS like that, I'd hope they took any precautions (personally, I wouldn't give a system like that direct Internet access, it'd have a LAN connection to a more secure system that I could copy data from)

>your typical home router firewall
Firstly, ACLs are going away due to being incredibly inefficient(and also just generally being inferior to letting you set a security policy to each individual machine.) Secondly, your typical home router ACL does NOT protect these systems. I know this because I tested that exact hypothesis. It did not, and my 98FE machine was fucked almost immediately.
Anyways, excluding XP is still weird because even ignoring the fact that XP can't be just drive-by attacked by unfiltered internet, XP is the only one even remotely in common use. Glory to Armenia. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/armenia

I don't know anyone aside from myself who still uses Windows XP for everything, but even I can't imagine getting by with Windows 2000... although they were only released a year apart, Windows XP has at least an extra decade worth of software support
The firewall issue is rather trivial in comparison, as you could just install a third party one

Here is some information about using win2k in modern day. Essentially, it just updates the kernel and drivers to do anything winXP/vista can:
https://w2k.phreaknet.org/guide/

I run a 2005 PC that runs freeBSD. It's as fast as I need it to be because I don't do anything, and it's secure.

>>13
> It's as fast as I need it to be because I don't do anything
I see.

>>12
I think I'm going to run win2k with this tutorial and another and test it with a lot of programs and security.