Re: Do you advise me to adopt NetBSD?

[Magnus Eriksson <magetoo%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2012, vitsen%gmx.com@localhost wrote:

> Linux is the opposite, and one often faces the situation where things 
> break down, or keep changing at such a fast rate that the user is 
> confused.
> From what I have read, NetBSD is safe in this respect, since it is much more 
> sober and conservative than Linux. Since I give a lot of importance to 
> stability and it-just-works, I am very much tempted by NetBSD.

I think that is a fair description.  However, the other side of the coin 
can be that a lot of "Unix" open source software is developed mainly on 
Linux, and it does occasionally happen that things break for no good 
reason, just because the Linux camp decided to do things differently.  So 
far nothing critical (for me, at least) but it might be useful to be aware 
of.

On the other hand, if what you need is available as binary packages from 
pkgsrc, you should be fine.


> What does worry me is that NetBSD might be too technical for an average user 
> like me, whose IT skills are not so advanced. Would I be getting myself into 
> unnecessary trouble by adopting NetBSD for my daily (trivial) needs?

There will likely be some techy stuff to get through in order to get 
things set up just right - but as has been pointed out, the documentation 
is generally pretty good, and the community is helpful, so you should at 
least be able to get out of any trouble you get yourself into.  :-)

But give it a try and let us know what you think.


MAgnus