Shane M. Coughlan [Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 11:38:36AM +0100]:
[...]
> Now, my question...I was drawn to NetBSD because of its small size (not much
> package litter in basic install...wonderful) and its portability.  However,
> I notice the consensus online appears to be that NetBSD is mainly for
> academic use, and that FreeBSD is better for commercial use, especially
> things like servers.  Given that you guys are experienced in such things,
> and honest, can you tell me what you think about that?

Well, asking "NetBSD or FreeBSD" in such way on NetBSD list is quite
pointless ;) Of course, go with NetBSD. Why? Currently FreeBSD 5.x series is
very, very unstable[*]. Also I noticed, that FreeBSD 5.x in some areas is
going in the direction, where NetBSD was long time ago (rc.d scripts, for
example). NetBSD 1.6 seems to have a better kernel hardware support layer
(I'm not saying NetBSD supports more hardware, I'm just saying, that it
supports, for example, combo PCMCIA cards, while FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x can't).

Also, this might be a good thing: if you use pkgsrc to create packages for
your system, and if sometime you will have to create Linux-based
distribution of it (because of incompatible hardware, for example), pkgsrc
should also work on Linux (I haven't tested it with KDE, but postgresql +
apache + php4 compile and work very good on RedHat 8.0).

NetBSD 1.6 is also much less memory-consuming than FreeBSD 5.1[*].

KDE works very good on NetBSD for me. It's fast, it doesn't coredump too
often (I haven't tested KOffice too much, BTW). It is a good choice for a
GUI, but another good choice seems to be Xfce 4 (from pkgsrc-wip.sf.net).

The only bad thing is (only sometimes) the interactivity[*] of NetBSD. While
normal work (I use Xemacs + konqueror + glade-2 + xfce + mysql + php +
postgresql + apache) NetBSD seems to be faster, than FreeBSD 5.x[**] and it
for sure consumes less memory. But when I unpack a large tar archive to
compile some files, the system sometimes just stops for a second (I have an
old IDE HDD). As I said, this effect doesn't occur while normal work. I am
running on a default setup, I suppose it could be much better if I tweak it
a bit (renice XFree86 and some other processes).

Go for NetBSD, you should not regret it. It's clean, fast, small and doesn't
include much bloat (well, unless you count kernel sources for the
architectures you won't use ;).

Regards,
-- 
Michal Pasternak :: http://pasternak.w.lub.pl
Noise to meet you.

[*]   Disclaimer: on my machine, on my setup.
[**]  Disclaimer: I am talking about my subtle, inner feelings. For you it
      might be totally different. No, we don't want to talk about it.