So I'm an FNOG (freakin-new-old-guy) who has been playing with systems since the days of paper tape and 029 punch cards. My first introduction to systems was a dialup connection via a 110baud model-33 teletype when I was in Jr high (back when we road dinosaurs up hill both ways in the snow).
Anyway, back at my NASA days in the early/mid nineties the boss asked me to look at pre-v1 linux as a free/cheap solution for some in-house server stuff so I took a whiff, promptly turned my nose up, and pushed them in the direction of BSDi (bsd-386) instead. From that point on I was fully immersed in all the different flavors of *NIX out there: solaris, ultrix, SVR4, irix, hpux, etc. In my personal life I decided to switch back to trying Linux again in early 2000s when the 2.4 kernel and supporting packages had stabalized a bit. After migrating thru a few of the distros of the day I ended up settling into the Fedora ecosystem. It was fine for a time, but as much hacking and tweaking as I do, I can't have a new release shoved down my throat every sixish months...well, that and the direction Redhat has pushed the Linux environment truly do leave me sick to my stomach.
Coming up to date, a couple of years ago I took the plunge and reconfigured my workstation and servers to run under Debian10, to spite the dpkg/apt package management scheme:
I'm generally a pretty good information source for "under the hood" knowledge, and am quite free with my opinions (of which I have many), so will attempt to keep folks on the straight and narrow if possible.
--- workstation config ---
Westmere E6520x2
48GByte ECC RAM
GTX1060i GPU: multi-monitor, mutli-X displays (not twinview)
md-raid and many JBOD
64 port Layer3 POE managed switch with about 10internal VLANS
Debian-bullseye (really need to do a custom full preemption kernel though)
many QEMU VMs.
