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What's Your Daily Driver?

I enjoy a pretty broad variety of games, but they're such a time-sink and I have other hobbies I want to commit to more, so these days it's mostly just the massive pile of excellent Quake WADs out there, which run totally fine on any moderately-specced *nix PC, plus the occasional foray into RenPy.
 
Platformers, JRPGs, action-adventure. Key stuff like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Sonic, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest. Generally 8 and 16-bit stuff, although lately I've been catching myself up on standout Wii titles in prep for likely getting a Switch in the next year or so. Metroid Prime 4 is on the way and I haven't had a modern game I've been waiting to drop in real-time in a while. One of the joys of older games is you don't have to wait for their release...
 
My current workstation that I'm in the process of migrating to a newer one:

i9-10850k
32 GB DDR4
RTX 3070 Ti
2 x 1 TB NVMe in RAID0
2 x 2 TB WD Black in RAID 1
2 x 1 TB WD Red

Newer workstation that's being brought up:

Ryzen 9 7950X3D
64 GB DDR5
X670E MSI Motherboard
2 x 1 TB NVMe in RAID1
Rest of hardware from the old workstation will be brought over.
 
Home built MSI AM3+ mobo with 32G DDR3, an AMD 6300 6-core and a pair of EVGA GT640 cards feeding 4 LCD monitors (3 wide, one above). 4x4TB WD Blues in Raid-5 for local storage, 3TB boot/OS drive containing 6 installed variations of Linux from Mint to Ubuntu Studio, and also able to boot from dozens of ISOs sitting in the Raid. My only regret is it won't boot from NVME.

ADHD... :)

Yes, it's showing its age, but does what I need it to do and when.
 
I use a custom built dual Xeon workstation with an RTX card and 5 monitors. I built the machine in 2018 and plan to still be using it by 2028, at which time I will build another ten year system. Right now I've got dual 3.4GHz 6 core CPUs. It runs OK.
 
Intel DQ67OW motherboard, SSD, two mechanical hard drives in software RAID-1, all living in a full-tower Chieftec Dragon. Running Ubuntu Linux. I've used basically the same setup since ~2011, though I've replaced the hard drives a few times.
 
JohnElliott said:
Intel DQ67OW motherboard, SSD, two mechanical hard drives in software RAID-1, all living in a full-tower Chieftec Dragon. Running Ubuntu Linux. I've used basically the same setup since ~2011, though I've replaced the hard drives a few times.
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Ever upgrade Linux or no need to.
 
If you don't plan on using the modern Internet, you can use old Linux versions fine. The only hangup would be optional/updated packages, but there are usually archive mirrors for old versions of distros that you can point your package manager to.
 
Ryzen 5 5600x, 8gb RAM, GTX 1060, 237 gig SSD + 465 gig HDD, running Windows 10 Home. Still have my Dell OptiPlex 170l (P4 HT 2.8ghz, 2gb RAM, GeForce 6200, 40gig HDD running Windows XP Home) hooked up to the same keyboard and monitor using a KVM switch, but these days it's used primarily for running older games and performing vintage computer related tasks such as burning CD-R's and writing IMG files to floppy disks.
 
I have 4 ‘dailies’
My server is an Intel NUC, running CantOS 8, which runs my NTP and DNS server for the internal network. I typically ignore things on it. It’s due for an update however.
My NAS is an old Synology (like 10+ years). These things just work. The DSM OS on it updates itself and I typically don’t have to worry about it. I have it sync files to an even older Synology as a backup.
I have a 8th Gen MSI laptop with a Nvidia 2060 gfx running Windows 10 as my gaming box. It’s capable of running Windows 11, just need to take the plunge.
My workhorse is an Apple Macbook Air M1. Even being a 1st gen, that M1 processor and only 8G RAM is enough to handle my main surfing, financial/tax software, and utilities and such. And it’s perfectly capable of games up to Civ 6.
 
IBM TrackPoint keyboard. 4K monitor. Unix. That's all the important stuff. The rest doesn't matter much. (In this case, it's been Debian for quite a while, just because they tend to be careful about the changes they introduce, and recently a mini-desktop with a Ryzen 7 7735HS, which is cheap and pleasingly fast.) But I could just as well be running Fedora on entirely different hardware and it would still work the same. (I use my own custom desktop system, with Fvwm as a window manager, so whatever the distribution gives me doesn't matter.)

And as far as the retro stuff goes, t8dev of course. That provides most of the tool support for my 8-bit development repo.
 
cjs said:
IBM TrackPoint keyboard.
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IBM Model M for me. Oldest and only beige part of my computer.

Ryzen 7 2700X, B350GT5 motherboard (2 PCI slots), still run internal disc drives and audio is through an old M-Audio Delta 1010 rack unit. 2 32" 2k monitors, would like to move to 4k but haven't been able to justify the cost at this point.

I've been running Debian testing ever since I upgraded my video card, RX6600. The drivers weren't available in the stable distro when I installed it.
 
DougM said:
This sounds interesting, are you in a position to tell us more?
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The Pi 4B isn't as difficult on power as the 5. So I attached a touchscreen to a 4B, add a mouse and a keyboard over USB and power it with a power bank made for smartphones and such. This results in a very small package, but fully useable system
 
Abmvk said:
The Pi 4B isn't as difficult on power as the 5. So I attached a touchscreen to a 4B, add a mouse and a keyboard over USB and power it with a power bank made for smartphones and such. This results in a very small package, but fully useable system
Click to expand...
I've been considering the same with my Pi 400, going as far as to build a little case to mount the keyboard and slightly larger screen screen in to make a poor-mans laptop. Then I could just click it into that when I'm on the go.
 
It's hard to nail down a "daily" driver since I use several different computers several times a week. But my main laptop, that I am typing on now, is a Lenovo Ideapad 330S from 2018. It has a Core i3-8130U, 4GB RAM, 120Gb SSD and came with Win 10 and updated to Win 11. But I rarely use Windows in it. I use MX 21 XFCE (Debian Bullseye) most of the time.

In my lab at home, when I want to use a desktop, my main desktop is a Dell OptiPlex 3020 MT with Core i5-4570, 8GB RAM, 650GB SATA, and Windows 10.

My main workstation at my office at work is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e with Core i5-3470, 8GB RAM, 1000GB SATA and Windows 10.

My server in the office at work is a HP Pro 3400 MT with Core i5-2300, 8GB RAM, 1000GB SATA and Windows 10.

I have a couple All-in-Ones that I use to sit down and check the web, email, etc. At home I have an HP Pavilion 23-1016 with an AMD A6-5400K, 4GB RAM, 250GB internal SATA and 1000GB External SATA, running ChromeOS on the External SATA and MX and antiX Linux on the internal SATA. At the office it's an HP 22-b016 AIO with a Pentium J3710, 4GB RAM, 1000GB SATA running MX 23 XFCE.

Most of my daily drivers are old hand-me-downs or from the surplus store and are over 10 years old. This laptop is my newest from 2018 and I bought it on clearance at Best Buy.

And as for gaming - Asteroids, Space Invaders, Block-out, Pong, and Sokoban and occasionally House of Cards.

Seaken
 
Mac mini with the M1 (ARM) chip, with two 21" monitors. Power consumption is definitely a plus - I have the MenuMeters app installed, and I haven't seen it break 100F on the CPU temperature (my previous Mac mini had an internal HD and an Intel CPU and when pushed hard, it was not uncommon to see it spike as high as 151F).

When I play games, it is mostly on my tablet, but I do have a couple emulators (C64 and a couple Nintendo ones) and a Gravis Gamepad squirreled away.
 
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