Re: Do you advise me to adopt NetBSD?

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hello Vit,

as you have seen from the experiences of others here, result can be mixed.

I use NetBSD since 1996 and I can say i love it. It is lean, clean fast. 
When things work fine (your hardware is supported properly) it is fast 
and resource friendly. You can use it on your 486 or on your laptop or 
on your sparc server, always being familiar. I run it on an embedded 
mini-pc and hardware support is very good, performances for the limited 
machine are excellent (well of course, if memory-hungry programs are 
run, then it crawls, but that ins not NetBSD's fault, but the bloat of 
mozilla browsers or gimp)

Boot is not as fast as it could be (windows 7 is now way faster, MacOS 
too...), but my gentoo-linux laptop and freebsd-box which have similar 
setups (I boot to command-line login) are about as slow.

For me, performance is good and for general desktop usage.
FreeBSD has an edge in terms of hardware support (but your luck may vary 
sometimes), performance is good and I find that linux emulation / linux 
binaries (which you might need for applications like skype, flash 
plugins and similar) might work better. I had no luck with wine on 
NetBSD either and valgrind doesn't work well.

NetBSD has a stable, traditional development chain with gcc and is not 
gong thorugh the clang transition mess of FreeBSD.

I use NetBSD almost daily on my laptop and it is very usable, I use 
GNUstep (as a developer though, not from packages) and the performances 
are good. I also have an OpenBSD, Linux and a FreeBSD laptop I use for 
about the same purpose (GNUstep development and general usage). NetBSD 
is the one I use quite often.

Plus sides:
- integrated WiFi works for me (I just need WEP, but connection and 
transmission quality is good)
- USB works fine with mass storage: flash and hard disks
- Audio is fine
- X11 works fast and well on the intel (after a a fix, I am running 
unstable)
- all packages I need installed fine

Problems:
- integrated ethernet works, but has reliability problems (watchdog 
timeouts). No solution was found yet. This is HW specific, on my ol' 
sparc box it works perfect, but my embdedded PC has very similar issues.
- package upgrade procedure is in my opinion not as smooth as on FreeBSD
- problems with linux emu packages (thus unable to use Skype)

SO, I recommend it. if you have troubles, report to the lists, usually 
for things that have quick solutions there are good answers. Bugs about 
graphic cards or sound drievrs I had were handled professionally and are 
now fixed in the unstable version, I hope soon to be released! Other 
issues are still open :(

Riccardo