Thanks for your suggestions. Usability improvements are welcome,
though I think that your suggestions are either already implemented or too
controversial.

> 1) The installation utility (sysinstall, is it?) could default to ffs2 
> over ffs1 for disk slices, perhaps even with softdeps enabled. Maybe 
> this is bad? Maybe it could at least more actively sell the option to 
> the user. Ffs2 seems to work MUCH faster, especially with softdeps 

Interesting, do you have any concrete benchmarks showing that ffs2 is
faster than ffs1 (with same mount settings)? Please report to tech-kern@
if you do. I also suspect that many developers do not trust softdeps
enough to make it default.

> enabled. Also, the default scheme of everything under one slice seems 
> like a bad idea to me. An "auto" feature ala FreeBSD's disklabel 

Probably it seems like a good idea to others. Having only one partition
saves you painful repartitioning in case where you got the sizes wrong.

> Command Line History is a big winner for 
> me, and I really had to dig in the man pages before I figured out how 
> to enable this basic feature. Actually, I would not go so far as to 
> say "put 'set -o emacs' or 'set -o vi'" in the skeleton '.profile'. I 
> think it at least deserved honorable mention in the wscons section of 
> The Guide. 

It is already in the default 4.0 beta and -current installs (set -o emacs
in the shell rc file). The documentation is in the FAQ:
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/misc/index.html#shells . Updates for the guide
are welcome, but should go under
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-boot.html#chap-boot-change-shell
not in the wscons section.

> 3) Another ammenity that I find indespensable, and missing in the 
> GENERIC kernel, is being able to scroll back the console buffer.

It is in the default i386 kernel already.

> 4) Defaulting or at least offering the option to default to wsvt25 
> over vt* would be handy. Again, nothing earth shattering, but having 
> color is nice. Maybe an option to default to a 132 column vt would 
> handy, too. (I am still digging in the manuals to figure this one 
> out.) A console framebuffer is overkill, I am sure, but anything to 
> fit more text on a modern display is nice, and since I cannot get X to 
> work for the life of me (bug report forthcoming), I am stuck with the 
> console for the time being. 

The problem is that if you have TERM=wsvt25 and telnet/ssh to some other
OS, it can happen that it won't know the terminal type.

> 5) Speaking of which... Defaulting to insecure consoles/terminals and 
> forcing an under-privledged account would make NetBSD more secure by 
> default.

Ask on tech-security@. Personally I don't see how is it more secure,
especially when adding sudo would mean one more setuid program in the base
install.

> 6) Having a simple browser and irc client available in much the same 
> fashion would be ammenable, too. How do you check the mailing lists 
> for bugs if pkg_add fails? 

I don't think an irc client belongs to the base system. Having a web
browser would be nice, though. This belongs to tech-userlevel@.