On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 12:38:25PM +0200, Christian Biere wrote:
> The term "emulation" is a bad choice ...

It is the name of that feature in NetBSD.

> "translation" or the like would have been a much choice.

The directory is called "/emul/linux" not "/trans/linux". Don't blame me
for using the well established term.

> The term "required" confuses me a bit as well because as long as it works
> it's pretty much as seamless as possible.

I know. But I still annoys me having to use a Linux binary for web browsing
under NetBSD because I cannot use Flash otherwise (which is unfortunately
required by a lot of websites).

> > that you unfortunately need to use the Internet these days.
> Like what? Flash? ;)

Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc.

> Unfortunally, you have to make some trade-offs as a NetBSD home user.

I know that. I'm using NetBSD for 12 years on machines at home now.

 The question is, whether gaming is a bonus or if it's a mandatory feature.

It is an interesting feature for me.

> I suspect the amount of games for Mac OS is also rare compared to Windows.

Indeed. But the average quality is higher because only the succesful
games get ported.

> Microsoft did at least 2 ingenious coups. The first was the MS-DOS
> deal with IBM, the second was DirectX for Windows 95.

When they announced supporting games under Windows 95 I didn't believe that
game designers would want to use that. I couldn't have been more wrong.

 I think, this presentation puts NetBSD in an unfair disadvantage. You don't
> have to use your "old WindowMaker", that's your choice.

That's correct. I do hoever prefer it over those:

> There's KDE, GNOME, Xfce etc.

I've not tried Xfce so far, only KDE and GNOME.

> You have the choice between bloat, eye-candy and light-weight solutions.

The nice thing about Mac OS X is that it has a lot of eye-candy but doesn't
feel bloated. The UI is very fast and responsive and the UI elements while
good looking are reasonably sized and don't eat up 90% of your desktop space.

> ... pkgsrc has a wide palette of those.

I'm using pkgsrc on my Mac OS X system actually. A lot of people keep
forgetting that it is a Unix below the shiny Aqua interface. There's a
Terminal application which allows to use a shell and all your favourite
Unix applications.

> So I'd say Mac OS is by default the best choice for people with certain needs
> and a certain taste.

Yes. I never said Mac OS X is everybody best choice. I just tried to
explain why it is my prefered desktop operating system.

> As Darwin is open-source, or is/was that just OpenDarwin, shouldn't these
> features be comparatively easy to port?

OpenDarwin ist AFAIK not complete.

> >     + journaling filesystem (HFS+)
> >     NetBSD:
> >     + better networking (e.g. faster NFS, reliable NIS)
> >     + better performance (e.g. filesystem)
> Doesn't that clash with the above "+ journaling"?

NetBSD seems to have the much more effective buffer cache.

> The pros for NetBSD sound a bit generic, in my opinion.

They are my personal experience.

> Well, I'd think it's at least questionable whether someone satisfied with
> a different system has sufficient motivation to make NetBSD just as good
> or even better.

Running NetBSD on my server has been enough motivation in the past.
But comments like yours seriously undermine that motivation.

> I believe this question is just a logical conclusion of the situation.

And I believe that such talk is cheap. Handling a NetBSD release is a
huge amount of work, not to mention all the day-to-day release
engineering stuff. I did it (twice even), you didn't.

So what you makes you think that you are entitled to blame me or any
other NetBSD developer which also uses Mac OS X for lacking the
proper motivation to contribute to NetBSD?

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/