Re: Downloading NetBSD - Too complicated ?

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 6:33 AM, Ottavio Caruso
<ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost> wrote:
> On 6 February 2014 13:51, Zafer Aydoğan <zafer%aydogan.de@localhost> wrote:
>> At that point, I crosschecked with www.netbsd.org and was embarrassed, how
>> complicated it is to get a copy of NetBSD.
>
> Don't be.
>
> Clicking on six links is not rocket science. I think Netbsd caters for
> a certain audience that wants to have a bit more control on the system
> and would gladly sacrifice a user-friendly web dialogue.
>
> What about the install.* documentation instead? That one is a bit too
> terse and frankly outdated. It assumes a certain experience with
> Netbsd which not everybody has.
>
> Not to mention the official documentation on the website, which in my
> opinion is based on the 5.x release.

I think NetBSD has been alienating newer users for a long time. Even
back in the 1.4 days when I started using it, it was difficult to get
installed.

The nature of it is probably not meant for complete noobs, but I agree
that it's probably more complicated than it needs to be. It would be
nice to have a "fast track" for the most popular hardware so that an
appropriate mirror and iso image would automatically be chosen based
on browser settings. Others do it, so I suppose NetBSD could too.

Andy