On Feb 7, 2009, at 09:40, der Mouse wrote:
Instead of seeing this as something like turn of tide, one could contemplate that also developers and contributors require desktops for their work. Providing people a modern workstation would presumably save time for the actual work, be it VAX or embedded devices with scare resources.Certainly. But nothing says they have to be the same OS. The tradeoffs are sufficiently different that I think it's often better they not be. If I wanted to set up a desktop for someone who wanted the Windows/Mac/Linux "desktop experience", I wouldn't pick NetBSD, even today, because that's not what it's good at. NetBSD can't be all OSes to all people.
I agree with your last point, but disagree with your overall statement. I think the idea of having an *option* to install a prebuilt-X and an array of tools (in whichever (or choice of) UI's is selected) is a good thing. This is amongst the reasons I use Mac's around the house for desktop, and have all NetBSD servers. I built a NetBSD desktop once. It took me days (largely due to slow compiles on that relatively old machine), and I still only had most of the tools I consider "basic".
I whole-heartedly support there being an installer option, and the back-end work to make such packages available on as many architectures as possible, so that a "basic" desktop is available.
I don't think I'm on-board for having lots of things like OpenOffice or five browsers in that base, but if that decision is made, the end result will be better than the nothing we have now.
Just my 2¢.
- Chris