My primary reason for using Unix at home was my aspiration to a career in IT. (Secondary reasons: I was a stone cold rebel, loathed Microsoft and Windows, and I

My primary reason for using Unix at home was my aspiration to a career in IT. (Secondary reasons: I was a stone cold rebel, loathed Microsoft and Windows, and I idolized figures such as Dennis Ritchie and Richard Stallman.) From my college days and first few jobs, I could see that any employer I'd be interested in, would care about my Unix skills, particularly on workstations such as Sun, HP, DEC, etc. To that end, I strove to run Unix of all kinds at home. I began with Minix--yes, on a 286-based IBM PS/2! It was little more than a toy and it barely did anything. Definitely there was no graphical interface, or any networking. But, I could definitely say that my PC did not run DOS or Windows, and there was my "homelab" beginning. I migrated to various types of BSD, and I experimented with some vintage hardware. I expanded the home lab with heterogenous machines running various synergistic network services. I documented everything and it was all humming along nicely in 1998, even when I only had 256Kbps DSL to the Internet. Fast-forward to 2020, I was hired in the education industry, and I'm certified in Linux and other IT skills, and I got to exercise a lot of those chops in the classroom. So guess what I've done? I no longer run Linux or Unix on anything at home. I run 100% consumer devices with stock Windows, Android, ChromeOS. There's simply no reason for me to run Unix here. There is no home lab goal. I tinkered with AWS and other cloud services, but there was also no real advancement there. What I need now at home is devices that are dependable, reliable, and diagnosable. I don't need to call my ISP or app support and go "well, I'm running Haiku and BeOS and Plan 9..." but I just need some production systems that will run my household. Because I do run a household on my devices. I do banking and health care and taxes, and I need bills to be paid on time, and paperwork to fill out. Using Linux simply complicates those things and makes me into a snowflake. Linux is fine for the enterprise, it's fine for my employers, but for me personally, it was getting in the way.