Jan Schaumann Talks About NetBSD on the Desktop

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.'"

Comments

Brilliant

[Tweekster]

I have been saying this for a long time. Basically to sum it up. Linux (and netbsd) ARE ready for the desktop. Because the end user wouldnt be installing linux, just like they dont install/upgrade windows. Someone else does that, the administrator, or the kid down the street. The administrative details can still lack, but that is immaterial since the person doing the work is already knowledgable (in theory) As long as their is an easy to use GUI available that makes it easy to get to their mail, the web, and possibly type something up, that satisfies most people's requirements.

FWIW

[Doctor Memory]

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.