What kind of tech stuff do you guys do?

Raspbian changed their name huh. I wonder if “pi OS” sounding a lot like “iOS” had anything to do with it… LOL

 

I agree, Raspbian was a great name.

 

Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop was the first distro I used as a daily driver. It has a windows 7 feel to it , very easy to use. Mint has all the basics you need right out of the start gate. I actually liked the cinnamon desktop so much I run it on Debian. As far as packages go , synaptic is so easy to use with mint no need to compile anything. I have a guinea pig old laptop that I have played with about 20 distros on. Zorin was OK but not for me. That's the beauty of linux , you make it your own. Another neat trick with Linux , You can install more then one desktop environment and switch between them on your login screen

 

I've used various versions of CentOS for personal server projects, primarily hosted at linode.com. I liked using them for the ease of deployment. It's been a few years, but they had, and I suspect still do have, many flavors of Linux that deploy in seconds.

But your post reminds me of back in the day when I ran my Linux servers at home. In 1999 I had a Redhat server dedicated as a router. I created iptables scripts, and routed a dedicated ISDN connection to several hardwired outlets using CAT5 cable. If I remember correctly, that ISDN had ~280kbps - about as fast as you could get back then when dial up modems were still the norm for home usage. For the day, that was pretty advanced stuff. And since then, I've always ran my Linux servers without any GUI, and have always stuck with Redhat or CentOS. Maybe I'll fire up a VM or two on my MBP. I have a VMware Fusion license that is currently unused. Always enjoyed Linux.

 

It was enormous at the time. It made running PC Anywhere remote desktop connections to Windows NT servers very usable, and the internet was nothing but low bandwidth sites. Of course now even phones have more computing power and bandwidth by many multiples.