Operating systems
I use Mac OS X for all my desktop computing purposes, and FreeBSD for servers. I’m very happy with FreeBSD (though pkgng has been causing me some frustration, and freebsd-update has a nasty habit of breaking my box), but OS X seems to get more annoying with every release. Also, HFS+ has many problems: I don’t trust it to store my data safely, there’s no way I can make a certain area of my filesystem be compressed or encrypted or case-sensitive or whatever, and it doesn’t support SSD TRIM on third-party drives.
Possible alternatives to OS X
- FreeBSD
- Some kind of Linux (Ubuntu is an obvious, but probably bad, choice)
- Haiku OS (probably R1 stable in 2020 or so)
Haiku’s BFS has many of the same problems as HFS+. It might conceivably use ZFS in the future though.
Things I need
- A web browser
- An email client (something like mutt might do, if I spent the time to learn it)
- A decent text editor (Emacs would do, if I spent the time to learn it)
- A terminal emulator
- A music player with decent library management that can play AAC files