Re: NetBSD with a gaming keyboard

[Christian Baer <christian.baer%informatik.uni-dortmund.de@localhost>]

On Wed, 2017-08-09 at 08:56 -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:

Hello Brian!

> hello.  I'm curious what brought you back to NetBSD from FreeBSD.

This could end up being a longer post - more than I'd care to write at
the moment. Additionally, I'm pretty sure, this is not the correct place
for such a discussion. So I'll just give you the short version:

With FreeBSD every update seems to break something - or many things.
Although I haven't looked much into this, I am guessing, this has to do
with dependencies that are not or cannot be resolved properly. A
security patch led to Firefox being without sound. Updating an
application left X no longer starting at all. In this case I could
resolve the problem by updating the nvidia-driver. But there were times,
when I had to start from scratch.

I remember a while back, that I could cause a panik after an update
during boot if I added a module to the kernel. This was on sparc64. I
could get the module to run by loading it at boot time, but compiling it
into the kernel was a nogo. I contacted the module's developer at the
time, described the problem and offered to run a Sun Ultra 60 with a
virgin FreeBSD and give him both ssh and serial access to it for
testing. But alas, no dice...

My hopes are that NetBSD with its focus on portability and code quality,
that I will get a slightly less feature-rich system, while saving me
some of the problems I had during the last couple of weeks with FreeBSD.
Call me boring, square or non-adventurous, but to me an update within a
release (example: from 10.1 to 10.1-p2) should *never* break anything
-especially not frequently used software like Firefox, X or GIMP.

I hope this satisfies your curiousity for now. :-) If I choose to stick
with NetBSD, I have decided to take some notes and then I might write
some more about this.

Best,
Chris