Long ago, I developed a tool for fully configuring a desktop system using any DE or WM on FreeBSD: https://github.com/outpaddling/desktop-installer/ This tool is quite sophisticated, mature and robust at this stage. A few days ago, I got around to creating a rudimentary analog for NetBSD, which proved to be pretty straightforward. The concepts are pretty much the same as on FreeBSD, but most of the specific configuration commands are different in some way. I've since added the NetBSD script to the project above and begun to separate the OS-specific from the common files. The current incarnation is in wip/desktop-installer in case anyone is interested. At this stage, the script can configure CTWM, LXDE, or XFCE from a minimal NetBSD install, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and augments the XDM login screeen with a background and Reboot/Shutdown/Restart-X11 buttons. Some screenshots are attached. On amd64, there are currently no binary packages for KDE, LXTQ, or MATE (though metapackages exist in the tree), and the Gnome package fails to install due to dependency issues. I also noticed that many of the binary packages are behind the source tree, which makes it difficult to work around issues and test updated packages. E.g. one cannot save time using "pkgin install gcc9" and then build qt6 apps from source, since pkgsrc will try to build the newer gcc9 in the tree as a dependency. So, I think the most important step for making this system viable will be getting the DE packages fixed and getting the binary packages more up-to-date in general. Having up-to-date CURRENT binary packages would be really helpful for developing and testing desktop-installer, though I realize that keeping up with all the commits to current would be pretty resource-intensive. FreeBSD does so for x86 and aarch64, but not other platforms. Beyond that, it appears from my brief exploration that it would not be too difficult to replicate the major functionality of the FreeBSD desktop-installer script on NetBSD. For example, I think most of the pieces exist for automounting external media, and we would just need to port the following: https://github.com/vermaden/automount (I think this could be ported to NetBSD's devpubd without much trouble) https://github.com/outpaddling/npmount (done, see wip/npmount) https://github.com/outpaddling/qmediamanager (partially done, see wip/qmediamanager) I'll keep poking at this as time permits. If anyone else has something to contribute, please chime in...
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