Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.

My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.

Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.

I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.

The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.

At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.

Much obliged for sharing your experience!