Subject: Re: advocacy
To: rmk@rmkhome.com, Richard Rauch <rauch@rice.edu>
From: Andy R <quadreverb@yahoo.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 02/20/2002 12:25:35
--- Rick Kelly <rmk@toad.rmkhome.com> wrote:
> You're right. In practice I favor the old, orginal
> FVWM, configured to look
> like motif, with 16 desktops. I do have KDE on my
> -current i386 box, but I
> figure that it's a good way to stress the system.
> :-)
> 
> My suggestion of KDE was just a suggestion of a
> desktop that a lot of users
> know about.

I agree that KDE is probably the best interface to
start with for non unix type users, because if you
know microsoft, you can reasonably get around in KDE
just fine. I can't think of another one off hand
that's as easy to use for the first timer.

That said, I also agree that if KDE was included,
maybe the default scheme and backdrop should be VERY
NetBSD geared, that is, make it look different than
anything else. Especially the Linux distros.

So what are we talking about here? The only people I
can see this really helping are the Wasabi people and
other people trying to sell a packaged CD (and kudos
to everyone that's doing it!). I always saw NetBSD as
the one you end up on after screwing around with Linux
long enough to get burned by one of the brain dead,
hack 'em up kernels they release once in a while. That
imported audience is probably perfectly capable of
dealing with what we have now. Likewise, if you have
FreeBSD people that end up with hardware that won't
run FreeBSD (Sparcs and macs being a perfect example),
they will also probably be able to deal with sysinst
just fine.

However, I would also like to see something similar to
/stand/sysinstall, if only for the package management.
Doing it by hand isn't all that big a deal, but it's
kind of nice to be able to scroll through something
and pick and choose anyway... I haven't tried sushi at
all, so I may be way off base asking for something
like that...

With the documentation from www.netbsd.org in hand,
installing NetBSD (on i386 anyway) doesn't seem to be
a very hard thing if you are already familiar with
installing Linux or FreeBSD.

Andy

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