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Jan Schaumann Talks About NetBSD on the Desktop

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the just-depends-on-how-much-work-your-willing-to-do dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Continuing his series of interviews, Emmanuel Dreyfus asks NetBSD's Jan Schaumann about his experience with NetBSD on the desktop. From the article: 'Jan Schaumann has been an important contributor to the NetBSD project for several years. He spent a lot of time working on the NetBSD package system, known as pkgsrc, and he currently uses NetBSD as his desktop system. We will try to learn from his experience during this interview.'"

2 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. FWIW by Doctor+Memory · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used NetBSD as my desktop for over two years, and didn't have any usability issues. Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for the occasional resume tweak. Plus all the "standard" FOSS stuff: Gimp, Apache, Tomcat, Ethereal, gAIM, etc. VLC for the (very) occasional MP3/DVD playback.

    Granted, I'm more of a pure software developer (I don't game, and I don't use my machine for "media" too much), but I can't recall a time when I got "stuck" because I didn't have some piece of software available. I believe both KDE and GNOME are available (I used AfterStep), so there shouldn't be too much confusion switching a Windows user over.

    --
    Just junk food for thought...
  2. "Primitive" and "simple" are not the same. by Homestar+Breadmaker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Notice that Solaris moved away from M:N and to 1:1. It is WAY simpler, and thus easier to do correctly and with good performance. NetBSD and FreeBSD are the only ones still trying to do M:N threading, because its too complicated, and offers only theoretical benefits that haven't actually been realized in practice.