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Old 30th April 2010
laconic laconic is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2010
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The advantage of NetBSD that I'm particularly interested in is that pkgsrc includes an up-to-date version of the LyX document processing program, which is compatible with the LyX version that I have used in some Linux distros. The versions of LyX that are available in FreeBSD and OpenBSD are older, and not compatible with the LyX documents that I have written in Linux.

I'd rather continue using Linux because that's what I'm used to, but the recent changes in Xorg break the graphical interface on my old laptop (although the older versions of Xorg worked just fine). The problem seems to be related to the close integration with the Linux framebuffer console and the newly introduced Intel Linux KMS, so I thought perhaps a BSD system might be worth a try because BSD's don't use a similar framebuffer console as Linux distros.

I need to study this issue a bit more. Perhaps I'll find that NetBSD suits my needs, or perhaps it doesn't. There are also a couple of other aspects where I suspect NetBSD might excel in comparison to the Linux systems I've used so far -- like leaving the system alone for several months and still being able to upgrade applications without any major breakages.

But my main concern is currently to see if I can make NetBSD work as a workstation OS with a graphical interface. And that's why I asked for NetBSD users who actually use this operating system as a workstation OS to share their experiences.
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