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Re: Does any common mortals here (not programmers or sysads) use NetBSD as their daily productivity driver?



"there's a bit of unnecessary bitterness" I didn't take it as bitterness, but rather frustration, and God knows I've been there (dare I say we've all been there) many times.

I work for a large financial organization as a Python developer (well, that's only one of my many hats, but it's the biggest one) and I am not a sysadmin or NetBSD developer. I am a hobbyist, and love to tinker. And that is what I do with NetBSD. Sometimes I want to do something simple that other OSs with "built-in" desktops provide out of the box, but with NetBSD I may need to dig and tinker a bit. And honestly I get a little miffed because "I just want it to work." Then I tinker and tweak and ask the mailing list and I'm okay with that.

Your original question is a good one, "what can you not do on NetBSD that you can do on any other OS?"

- I've been playing with an RPI3 and installed NetBSD on it. The only thing I ran into was the python libraries and rust crates for the GPIO interface have a lot of C bindings particular to Linux. (I just want to setup an RPI3 to a motor so I can roll the patio shade up and down.)

- You cannot have ZFS on boot with NetBSD... yet.

- Some popular desktop apps are not available.

- You may not be able to take advantage of the newest hardware (again, as a hobbyist I am thinking desktop)

So to your original question, that depends on where you spend your time.
If it's a desktop you want, there are many good options for NetBSD, as far as window managers go, but there may be some lack in desktop apps you normally use.
If it's a server you want, then I can't think of anything NetBSD can't do. But then again, I'm not a sysadmin.



    
On 10/1/22 5:52 AM, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
On Fri, 30 Sept 2022 at 17:57, Fekete Zoltán <fekete.zoltan%minux.hu@localhost> wrote:
Hi There,

My daily driver with NetBSD 9.3 is a Lenovo Thinkpad t430s (2013)

Works:
- wifi
- i915 display
- mini dispay port output
- Hungarian keyboard
- audio
- webcam
- USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports
- card reader

Works partially:
- touchpad (no two finger gestures)

Does not work:
- display backlight. Workaround: set the brightness when starting up the
laptop (BIOS handles).

Generally a very good choice for a portable NetBSD workstation. The
screen resolution and screen quality is a bit low end, though.
Owerall performance is quite impressive, I suggest to install 16GB of
RAM and SSD. Firefox startup time after coldstart is about 2-3 seconds.
I use that to develop C++ applications using NetBeans IDE. The build
time is acceptable as I can use 4 cores.

I'm not having a go at you, but I stated in my topic "not programmers
or sysads" and I practically got answers only from that category.

So, my impression is: if you're not either a programmer, a sysad or an
NetBSD official developer, stay away.

Yes, I know , there's a bit of unnecessary bitterness in my statement
but please change my mind.


-- 
"There seems to be a scratch in the prism of my understanding."


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