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Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid that nightmare might be helpful.

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I started playing with OpenBSD 6.3 as a desktop (actually laptop) OS a couple of months ago. Installation was very straightforward. In my case I used the whole disk, no dual boot.

Here's a tribute/introduction written by Derek Sivers:

https://sivers.org/openbsd

As for my own experience, I don't know if I'm ready to give up Debian as my primary desktop OS, but I really like OpenBSD on my coding-or-surfing-on-the-couch laptop.

On the server side, I also use both (as VPS) for personal projects.

I've just improvised my way through a netBSD install on an old thinkpad X60 with 1Gb ram and a mechanical hard drive, whole disk, defaults mostly. Seems generally quite similar to OpenBSD (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD).

$PKG_PATH is set up but commented out in the .profile for root. I'm going for a light window manager and Seamonkey and a few bits and pieces to see how the land lies.

> (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork from netBSD)

... Over 20 years ago. Over almost the exact same time period NeXTSTEP became OSX. Any similarities are probably more coincidental or due to on-going borrowing from each other than to do with the fact that one is forked from the other.

Alas, can't install many packages, dependency errors. Example below for texlive-collection-all

     fmtutil [INFO]: Not selected formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: Total formats: 29
     fmtutil [INFO]: exiting with status 0
     pkg_add: no pkg found for 'tex-pgf-[0-9]*', sorry.
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgf-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgfplots-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-milog-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: Can't install dependency texlive-collection-langgerman-[0-9]*
     pkg_add: 1 package addition failed

This could just be mirror flakiness, $PKG_PATH is resolving to

     http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/8.0/All

There appears to be no native binary for LibreOffice. Investigating.

Building packages can't start until the final release build of the base Operating System has been done, things like LibreOffice depend on a lot of other things. Maybe check again in a couple of days.

Cool, will try again in a bit. Looking very interesting so far.

The one BSDish distro with an easy GUI installer and desktop friendly settings was TrueOS which is undergoing a metamorphosis at the moment.

For the most part you can just hit enter through the installer for any of them and have a working system. To set up a graphical environment you will need to do a little reading. I would generally say any of the BSDs are easier than Arch and Gentoo to set up but offer similar capabilities if you dig in. Slightly harder than Debian text installer, maybe 1:1 with slackware.

To set up a graphical environment you will need to do a little reading.

That was the gist of their complaint. I'm guessing that since these guys (one uses Arch) both worked their way through LF-Scratch last year, they're not up to more reading right now.

Installing NetBSD is not for the faint of heart, but installing Arch Linux is a lot harder, if that is helpful. I would say it is a little harder than Debian, unless you want to cover exotic scenarios like a diskless workstation.

It depends on whether 'installing' only means the installation or the installation and configuration of hardware. Because once you have installed Arch, configuration is probably easier on the average machine due to wider hardware support.

It's been a while since I installed NetBSD, but the last time, on-board sound wouldn't work without kernel driver patches. And hardware-accelerated OpenGL on a modern GPU was unsupported.

(That said, I used NetBSD as my desktop OS besides Slackware Linux from ~2001-~2005, and it is an exceptionally clean and nice Unix.)

By "installing" I meant all the steps until the system boots from the HDD/SSD.

I have only ever used NetBSD as a server system, so I have no idea what the hardware support on desktop systems is like.

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