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Old 20th July 2009
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by marc View Post
Hello everyone,

I am using OpenBSD for a quite some time on several machines - from server to desktop range [in fact - it serves me great as my main desktop OS of choice], and i recently installed it on Lenovo S10e netbook.
Seems to me switching to NetBSD based on amount of time you invested in learning OpenBSD will be a waste of time.


Quote:
Originally Posted by marc View Post
Also - I'm testing NetBSD installed on USB thumb drive and I must say I'm quite undecided about which OS would be the best [when it comes to the HW support - ACPI in particular, with a special emphasis on a fan device - I'd like it to be as quiet as possible, and it depends on the ACPI part too].
I am a bit surprised that as a seasonal OpenBSD user you missed information about dramatic improvement in ACPI support coming for the 4.6 release. I would expect from a user like you to help testing OpenBSD instead trying "distros" like a Linux teens.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=a...20090613150019



Quote:
Originally Posted by marc View Post
I'm pretty aware of many advantages/disadvantages of those two OSs
but I'm not a hardware guy, you know.
So make a list of things you expect to work on your Laptop (suspend, resume, etc...). Install both of them on the particular piece of hardware, and check how both systems behave.

Quote:
Originally Posted by marc View Post
side, but HW support is important to me as well.
Sounds to me that you wanted to start some kind of a flame war. NetBSD project has made some tremendous progress recently and looks completely invigorated. Despite the fact that I am an OpenBSD user, I am very excited about those changes as they bring diversity to BSD ecosystem. However those changes have little impact for a casual desktop/notebook user. The only obvious advantage of NetBSD over OpenBSD for a casual desktop computer user that I can think of is Linux compatibility layer including Linux comp on amd64. I am not sure if you could install the latest Maple or MatLab but you could reasonable expect Flash 10 just to work. Skype is iffy at least according to mailing lists. I do not know if they have some kind of ALSA emulation for their implementation of OSS (which is crappy and is completely rewritten for 6.0) which can be very useful for multimedia. In that case they would have more multimedia software ported to NetBSD.

On the final note bigmem on OpenBSD is not ready yet and SMP support is really behind comparing to NetBSD. If you have 4GB of RAM and you really want to take advantage of those multiple cores in certain applications NetBSD seems like a logical choice.

Last edited by Oko; 20th July 2009 at 03:12 PM.
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