Re: Desktop NetBSD needs your help

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

Michael Litchard <michael%schmong.org@localhost> writes:

> I started with Slackware back in 1996. Further down the path to the
> Dark Side I went, and moved to Red Hat. Eventually I grew disgusted
> with how things kept moving around every odd upgrade, and their "Hey
> it works for me" attitude. I tried openbsd and freebsd but had to keep
> fighting the install.
> Then I tried netbsd. It just worked. I was a relative newbie, and for
> me it just worked. At last, I thought, I can spend time getting things
> done instead of spending all my time figuring out how to configure
> this and that. Yes, sometimes I want to goof off and watch youtube
> videos, and for that I use some other computer. I have some issues
> with vnc that makes my windows xen vm crippled,
> but I deal. It's not *that* important.
> I've noticed a change in unix culture over the last 10 years or so.
> More and more I encounter the self-entitled who expects to have
> everything they want for free, and not have to learn anything.
> I blame the ethic behind Ubuntu for propagating this. If you don't
> want to learn anything, why are you using a *nix?
                ~~~~~~~~
Underline it, it's important.

Do you understand the difference between "anything" and "everything"?

I don't want to explain my colleagues why they are required to read
documentation to GNOME, KDE, learn all those tweaks. If my colleague
wants FORTRAN, PERL and visualization tools for research, Octave or
Scilab and Maxima or Axiom for teaching, that is what he needs to learn.
Forcing him into tweaking desktop software so that it doesn't get in
the way isn't nice. And it shows up: some of them stick to Slackware,
where they have simple and nice enough looking WindowMaker.

> In short, having better audio and wireless drivers would be nice. But
> if I really want them I'll do it myself. I must not really want them,
> because I spend my time doing the things I really want.

What happens if you pull out mounted USB flash medium? Kernel panics, right?
Maybe not necessarily, but the probability is high then, right?
Do you defend, that this should be left as is, so that all R&C stuff,
who dared to choose NetBSD for its seemingly higher productivity and
easier maintainance, learnt painfully that one should manually umount
media as fast as possible?

Sometimes there emerges need to work with audio and video records,
e.g. transcribing lecture or conference presentation. Sometimes there
emerges need to create presentation slides. Yes, I know how to do that
in TeX, but that requires good deal of work. The common case is such,
that you don't have time for that.

> Now, there are some people who really want to develop a better Desktop
> for NetBSD. But who will this attract? I was once a newbie (still am,
> but a different kind of newbie), and loved how easy the install
> experience was. Don't understand disk geometry? Look it up. It's too
> scary? Use something else.

I don't understand why researching chemist, physisist or biologist
need to understand disk geometry quirks. How does it help them in
their work? Do you think that all those professors with academic
degrees are so stupid that they can't understand it? Sure, no, some
of them remember PDP-11 days. Does it mean that they should worry
about the same disk geometry issues these days? Why?


-- 
HE CE3OH...