Re: Do you advise me to adopt NetBSD?

[Pongthep Kulkrisada <ptkrisada%gmail.com@localhost>]

* vitsen%gmx.com@localhost (vitsen%gmx.com@localhost) wrote:
> > I've had a rough time with NetBSD, worse on the new computer (Intel 
> Sandy Bridge)
> > than the old.  FreeBSD worked better.  You might want to try NetBSD 
> or FreeBSD
> > to see how it works, but don't burn your bridges on Linux.
> >
> > I would say NetBSD is more minimalistic than FreeBSD; FreeBSD seems more
> > forward-looking, and stabler.
> 
> The impression that I got (which may as well be wrong) is that FreeBSD 
> is more mass-oriented than Net-/OpenBSD, although not as much as PC-BSD, 
> of course. Next to PC-BSD, FreeBSD is probably the more Linux-like of 
> BSD distributions. And that is precisely the reason why it does not 
> attract me.
Every system has its pros and cons. No one is the absolute winners.
NetBSD's philosophies just hit my personal taste.
I am also a newcomer to NetBSD. After I have tried it for few weeks,
NetBSD gave the feeling of clean design and what the real Unix should be.
It is very conservative, highly portable and adhering to the standard.
(It does NOT pretend sh is bash, csh is tcsh or vi is nvi/vim for example.)
It is running from toasters to space mission.
It is ideal for embedded applications.
Its system update process is very simple and intuitive.
pkgsrc, released quarterly, is much more stable than FreeBSD ports, IMHO.
I also found that its binary is much smaller than other systems.

There are also cons for NetBSD. Some of them I'm trying to resolve.
It lacks hardware supports for daily used devices e.g. memory stick.
Its native firewall (NPF) is still not completed.
It lacks UDP encapsulation for carrying IPv6 packets to machines behind NAT,
although some workarounds are available.
It has not supported Posix.1b (real time).
There are also some other trivial issues.
Regarding keyboard, erase is backspace. HOME and END keys are bogus in lynx.
ls(1) is not colored, unless additional pkg is installed.
(But I think they are intention for the reason of conservation.)

Regarding performance,
I haven't used Linux for very long time.
Dating back to 2005, in my test, FreeBSD was faster than Red Hat and Slackware.
Nowadays I am using both FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Sometimes FreeBSD is faster and sometime NetBSD is faster.
There is no absolute winner.

But once you get used to *BSD, I think you will never go back to Linux.

-- 
Pongthep Kulkrisada
 
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system,
but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
-- Dennis M. Ritchie