Re: Definition of NetBSD users

[markucz%gmail.com@localhost]

> Hmmm....  I don't know all the details, but since you and others have
> mentioned youtube as the prime motivator for wanting to be able to run a
> Flash plugin in a browser, perhaps you don't know that you can actually
> download the video content on youtube (and perhaps google video and
> others) in some "reasonable" video format and then play it with a proper
> video player application.
Right, someone mentioned youtube-dl and I gave it a try. It mostly works
(doesn't handle additional args in URL though -- if you feed it with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobarbazqux&fmt=18 it ignores the "&fmt=18"
part which gives you the hi-res MPEG version of the video).

> However youtube is also starting an HTML5 video experiment:
> http://www.youtube.com/html5
I'm a bit sceptical about HTML5. There's too much politics involved w.r.t.
what codecs are to be used and Firefox isn't listed as supported.

The whole "desktop users" business is tricky because you gotta have a clear
definition -- as thread name suggests -- what you mean by "user" and
"desktop". Leaving the "user" part alone, we come to "desktop". What kind of
desktop: something small enough to be reasonably functional (FVWM, Blackbox),
something bigger like CDE, which by today's standards is actually
lightweight, or a fullblown GNOME/KDE?

In the latter case, those come with a huge ammount of of bells and whistles.
Flash is one of them, and 3D acceleration is quite desirable. Using GNOME/KDE
comes at the expense of polluting your system with packages you don't need
and probably won't ever use (even pkgsrc with its foo.options doesn't solve
this problem). So once you get reconciled with this idea, Linux is the logical
choice -- with all the joys of RPM Dependency Hell (TM), modular Xorg, hack
and rogue being installed in /usr/bin and other such abominations. I think
that's why I keep my NetBSD installations X-less. What I really would like is
something light and clean such as QNX's Photon.

Cheers