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What's Your Daily Driver?

segaloco

segaloco

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 30, 2023
Messages
137
I'm curious what sort of setups other vintage computer nerds use for their day to day computing.

For me it's a Raspberry Pi 400 running a custom-but-stock GNU/Linux system clobbered together from upstream source packages. Think Linux-From-Scratch but not tightly following their recipes. SysVinit+standard GNU userland+X11+dwm. Most stuff done through fbcon and xterm but I do have Firefox installed for more conventional web browsing.

Peripherals are a 1920x1080 LCD monitor, basic mouse, and a Sun type-7 USB keyboard with the extra copy/paste/etc keys. Audio is through a custom interface I built to drive two Western Electric 107-type speakerphone speakers, although I've got a sub and a couple of modern speakers for when I need higher fidelity (the 107s are band-limited to the standard telephone voiceband, but they look cool and have 70s Bell System logos...).

It's quite minimal but I enjoy that. Boot and shutdown times are on the order of seconds and I've written a plethora of scripts and utilities for my most common projects (document scanning, disassembling old video games, programming experiments). It gets some gameplay re: emulation and Doom although most older game stuff I run on a Wii spitting YPbPr into a Trinitron.

I couldn't find another "what's your daily system" thread but if there is an established one, I'll gladly rewrite this as a reply to that one. Otherwise I'm certainly interested in what other folks turn to for their day-to-day!
 
Hp z400 xeon workstation windows 7 pro 64.


Modern computers (pentium 4 and newer) are incredibly boring. I feel zero reason to "upgrade".
 
It's as far from vintage as you can get...
MacBook Pro 16" M3
Yeah it was not cheap, but I'm retired and 72. I expect it's the last laptop I will buy.
 
jlang said:
It's as far from vintage as you can get...
MacBook Pro 16" M3
Yeah it was not cheap, but I'm retired and 72. I expect it's the last laptop I will buy.
Click to expand...
I haven't gotten to play with Apple ARM yet, my work host is the last round of Intel MacBook Pros. A few coworkers have gotten the ARM ones though, I hear one of the main pros is power consumption. I do have an ARM laptop, the Pinebook Pro, although it hasn't become my main due to vendor failures in getting their chosen USB3-HDMI protocol drivers to stick in the Linux kernel. I can't use it as a desktop so it is limited to the occasional coffeeshop visit or travel (which is rare these days). I do appreciate how much time I can get out of a single charge compared with my old HP laptop. If nothing else it gets very little use so should hopefully last as long as my last laptop (served me well for 15 years...).
 
I use 2015 MacBook Pro 15" with 1984 IBM 5155 keyboard (Honeywell hall effect numpad) and CH Products DT225 Trackball and 2013 15" MacBook Pro (Mavericks) with 1980 IBM 3278 keyboard and another DT225. The trackpads I use for some features (swiping/pinching), but I prefer trackballs for moving the pointer.

I also occasionally use my Victor 9000 keyboard, Teletype Model 40, Japanese IBM "pingmaster", Apple AEK, M0116, etc. - all USB converted to use with the MacBook Pros.
 
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AMD FX-770K with a GTX 660, housed in an old Pentium 3 desktop case, running Windows 2000. 1600x1200 LCD. IBM Japanese keyboard which isn't very good (but the last two keyboards broke and this is what I'm left with). Amplified speaker set with center subwoofer. 500mbit fiber connection. Parallel and serial ports for running null modem cables to retro systems. USB oscilloscope, USB ROM programmer, USB VGA capture, USB analog TV capture, JTAG dongle, PICkit 3, USB 3.0 ATA adapter, USB SNES gamepad. And a DVD+RW drive.
 
Just a boring MacBook Pro 13’’ M1Pro from job + Nec 4K IPS monitor.
MacBook Air M1 for personal stuff
Latest Intel Macs are very sad and underwhelming, I recommend not to hesitate to upgrade to Arm ones if you have the means.

For games: Win11 i9 11900K on a Z690 chipset + RTX3080Ti (yes I know it’s overpriced, snatched one during gpupocalipse, when had a chance to buy one on Newegg lottery)
 
Maikudou said:
Just a boring MacBook Pro 13’’ M1Pro from job + Nec 4K IPS monitor.
MacBook Air M1 for personal stuff
Latest Intel Macs are very sad and underwhelming, I recommend not to hesitate to upgrade to Arm ones if you have the means.

For games: Win11 i9 11900K on a Z690 chipset + RTX3080Ti (yes I know it’s overpriced, snatched one during gpupocalipse, when had a chance to buy one on Newegg lottery)
Click to expand...
For a daily driver "boring" is a feature. I want it to just work...
The Apple silicon Mac's very fast and great battery life.
 
A microsoft surface laptop windows thing, I think, from work
MacBook Air M3 16G for my hobby projects
Raspberry Pi 5, also hobby
Raspberry Pi 4B, portable solution for outdoors hobby
Lenovo gaming laptop, well, for gaming
iPad Air for reading, movies, and such
 
Lenovo ThinkCentre I5-4570 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 500GB SATA on a Dell 24" 1080P monitor.
This is just for emails, browsing, etc.
 
Last gen Intel iMac with a Drive in theater sized screen, 72 GB of RAM, and a bunch of dangly USB hard drives plugged into it.

Just upgraded to Sequoia. Next version of the OS will be the last for the Intel series.
 
Been running Devuan on various middling Thinkpads since 2016. Not a *nix partisan, I just realized with the Win10 rollout that MS was just never going to stop screwing around with my workflow for no good reason...
 
commodorejohn said:
Been running Devuan on various middling Thinkpads since 2016. Not a *nix partisan, I just realized with the Win10 rollout that MS was just never going to stop screwing around with my workflow for no good reason...
Click to expand...
Second on Devuan here - running a simple small IdeaPad 1, 4GB RAM , 128GB MMC onboard and a Pentium Silver CPU hooked up to a decent 32" 4k monitor; when I get a chance will upgrade to 12GB RAM. Devuan doesn't let me down.
 
M2 Pro Mac Mini for me, about to upgrade to a M4 Max MacBook Pro. I strongly prefer a Unix environment and the Mac has broad commercial software support too (unlike Linux) so it works out great. I play games daily on a Windows PC but I wouldn't call it my "daily driver".
 
<thread hijack>

Several of you have mentioned that you have machines you play games on - I've never been much of a gamer so I'm curious what games this particular demographic (so far as I identify it) finds interesting?

</thread hijack>
 
I think it is very personal more than demographic specific. I play many different kinds Mostly Action RPGs and RTS. Right now what is installed is a couple of engineer games like Signal State, Exa Punks, Shenzhen IO, Last Call BBS (ok, this one is very on topic) as well as Cyberpunk, Forza Horizon 5, Age of empires 1-4 (all of them) and Horizon Zero Dawn.
Just finished Talos Principle 2 DLCs, this kind I particularly enjoy
 
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DougM said:
<thread hijack>

Several of you have mentioned that you have machines you play games on - I've never been much of a gamer so I'm curious what games this particular demographic (so far as I identify it) finds interesting?

</thread hijack>
Click to expand...
I play a range of games: MMORPG, vehicle simulators, single player story-driven games and RPGs, and a personal favorite is newly made retro pixel graphics games in the style of Sierra Online adventure games. I do play some actual retro games too but not much, just for testing old hardware.

I like to see the leading edge of technology as it emerges. For example I never thought I would live to see real time ray tracing, or that I will likely see real time AI-generated interactive movies.
 
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