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

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

I think you are making a pretty big mistake by assuming we all
weren't "common mortals" once. Nobody is born writing device
drivers. But NetBSD is an excellent place to get into that,
the BSDs have a long heritage in education.

By considering NetBSD in the first place you're already opening
yourself up to non-mainstream options. By and large, NetBSD
people are hobbyists, very few people (especially outside of
Japan) are being paid to work with NetBSD. I don't have any
computer-related qualifications, and I work in the industry _because
of my NetBSD-related hobby work_, not the other way around.

You're on IRC a lot of the time requesting help from people who've
mostly learned by trying things, making experiments, breaking things
and picking up the pieces themselves.  You have to not be afraid to
do that.  There's very little "hidden knowledge", everything you can
possibly learn about NetBSD is available on netbsd.org (the man
pages, the list archives, the source code) really.  Other sources
aren't anywhere near as reliable.

I think even if computer hobbyism, you might still find NetBSD
effective for web browsing, which is where most non-mobile-app things
are positioned these days.

Increasingly, this is a world where you can get by _without_
using a desktop computer. That ship sailed in the 2010s.

My life is organized through my phone, and I open my non-work
computer for a few little things (working on creative projects
and stuff like that). So there is nothing to "miss" any more.

NetBSD, of course, does a very fine job at routing the traffic
between your phones, game consoles, and whatever else that
conveniently hides most of the "conventional computer" architecture
from you. Many people use it in that role.