Thinking about NetBSD for everyday computing...

[Patrick McC^very]

Hi Everyone

I am totally exhausted. I should not be allowed to post on the internet right now!

I am day dreaming about switching over to NetBSD. I figure it would give me more insight into Minix and I might be able to contribute something one day.

I run Trisquel Gnu/Linux

I like it a lot but I am much more attracted to smaller software these days,

I run a dual head setup. I rotate my monitors so that they are both vertical in such as way as the width of the monitor is now the height.

I am thinking about running ctwm and using xrandr to rotate. I would like to have Minix on one monitor and NetBSD on the other.

If I was running NetBSD do you see any pitfalls with these app which I commonly use:

kicad

arduino

gftp

firefox or similar

thunderbird or similar

xchat

libreoffice

vim or gvim

gimp

inkscape

I am running an older Intel I7 .  I havce Minix on a laptop right now but I will buy an older desktop for it.

Please let me know if you think I am headed into trouble-Pat

[r0ller]

Hi Patrick,

I'd suggest checking out NetBSD in a virtual machine first to see if it fits the bill. If you have NetBSD related questions, the best forum you can reach out to is the netbsd-users to which you can subscribe at http://netbsd.org/mailinglists/ but you can find specialized forums on the page too. Although, I use NetBSD on my desktop, I don't know all the packages you mentioned by heart but at the first glance half of them should not pose any problem. In general, you won't have problems when using NetBSD but there are some topics like supporting the newest sw/hw is lagging behind hot linux distros, using win32 or mixed arch (32/64bit) windows programs on wine64 is still an issue (win32 on wine (32bit) works fine), etc.

Best regards,

r0ller

[Patrick McC^very]

Hi r0ller

Okaay with that feedback, I will venture out to NetBSD. I can set it up on on a seperate computer first. 

I will feedback ab out my experiences. After comparing Minix and NeteBSD I will feedback about what might help people who are trying to move over to Minix 3 as much as they can, for daily computing.

Have a great day

[r0ller]

Hi Patrick,

By the way, if you anyway use Linux now and you can't run something natively on NetBSD, you still have the linux emulation layer as an option which I use e.g. to get adobe flash player plugin running in the native NetBSD browser -in my case Midori but you'll have to do the same for Firefox:) That's of course no option for heavy duty stuff (like you won't get wine running via linux emulation) but works for the rest.

Best regards,

r0ller

[Patrick McC^very]

Hi r0ller !

I didn't know about that! Thanks very much