2024-08-06

fellow SDFer, nm03, asks a question on his phlog[1] about the speed
of pkgin upgrade being really slow.

By an incredible coincidence, I actually installed netbsd 10.0 on
one of my HP laptops just last Saturday. I figured I would talk
about my impressions of installing netbsd.

but first, I don't really have a good answer for nm03. My observation
is that updating netbsd with pkgin is definitely slower on my laptop
than the Fedora operating system it replaced. I definitely noticed
that download speeds were rather slow for me in North America
averaging around 600-700KB/s. Downloading updates from Fedora is
at least twice as fast. However, I don't ever think it reached to
the level of taking an entire day. But then again, the netbsd "full"
install from the CD ISO is incredibly sparse and I'm not sure I
even had 700 packages to download.

I have 2 theories on it: Either the netbsd web infrastructure is
just not that great _OR_ the intel wifi driver for my old HP laptop
is pretty crappy and doesn't allow it to go full speed. I'm honestly
not sure which is the cause.

It has been a few years since I last installed netbsd on actual
hardware and I have to say that getting netbsd ready for desktop
use on a laptop is pretty tedious. Definitely not as tedious as
OpenBSD but still pretty tedious.

My first big complaint is the pkgin program itself. All the
documentation recommends using this program to install binary
packages. It's littered everywhere in the handbook, on the FAQs,
on the web. But why is pkgin NOT installed from the ISO? Instead
you have to read the handbook and download a copy from the internet.
And then you have to export a bunch of environment variables and
such to make it work. It's not hard but it's just tedious AF.  am
I missing something? why not just set it up for everyone to use.

And that kind of leads to a more philosophical question. What is
netbsd's real purpose? I mean it's UNIX so it is definitely a server
grade operating system. SDF runs netbsd of course. I know netbsd
wants to kind of grow past its "even toasters run netbsd" compatibility
meme. but when you think of netbsd, you think of all these really
cool and exotic hardware that it runs on and a lot of that hardware
is workstation stuff.

Maybe netbsd can lean more into desktop/workstation differentiation.
Like is there a particular reason why more focus can't be put on
a default install that resembles Fedora Workstation more than it
does FreeBSD?

netbsd actually has a lot of native APIs and interfaces that make
it pretty cool for workstation use. Its audio subsystem is an
example for one.

I'm not expecting netbsd to turn into ubuntu linux but certainly
there's some room between ubuntu and openbsd in terms of default
applications or user friendliness for the a desktop default install.

I mean, my "full" install didn't even have unicode support in xterm
when it first booted. I'm not even sure what magical incantation
from pkgin enabled that support to be honest. All I know is that
I installed unicode-rxvt, firefox, and some other desktop apps and
suddenly xterm could read japanese/chinese file names.

It's probably not netbsd's fault that the first audio output in my
laptop was the digital output. But I mean having to read the handbook
just to select the headphone jack as the default output device just
seems silly. I mean not a single Linux installation ever had a
problem outputting sound from the headphone jack immediately. Do
linux distros just have one more if statement than netbsd to select
analog headphone/speaker jacks by default???

Anyways, this is all just nitpicking really. Maybe netbsd really
doesn't need that much polish from its install. Afterall, I think
the people that choose netbsd for their personal desktop use are
probably the people that like configuring and building their systems
from nothing anyways. Afterall, I installed netbsd purely for
enjoyment. If I wanted everthing to work perfectly out of the box,
I could just install Linux.

so in the end maybe netbsd shouldn't change at all...(except put
pkgin in default install srsly guys)

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/nm03/2024/AUG2024/entry-3