Oh sure, that’s why I included the parts between the parentheses. I’ve heard multiple accounts that NetBSD can be used as a desktop OS, but most of them had an asterisk after them (in the sense of some important program being missing or something not working or simply being prohibitively slow), so I wanted to quantify what exactly a “full desktop OS” would mean for me.
It has a low-cost Linux syscall compatibility layer, so it is even possible to run Linux binaries if you must, but I don’t know how up-to-date it is.
As far as I understand, from reading others’ experiences it’s only a subset of calls and doesn’t support stuff like futexes and other modern kernel APIs, because that’d require more than simply mapping.
I got tired of dealing with some issues in pkgsrc
I’m curious, could you please elaborate what sort of issues you had? (I’m aware of what ports/pkgsrc is.)
At the time (don’t know if this is better now), pkgsrc had quarterly snapshots from which binaries were built and made available. When a vulnerability was found in a package, the corresponding binary would be removed from FTP. This led to the unfortunate case that one would have to recompile the package from source. And if it was a lower-level dependency like, say, libpng, this would cause a cascade of recompilations of everything and the kitchen sink (e.g. Emacs, Firefox, etc) leading to hours of recompiling.
Because you’d want to recompile a non-vulnerable version, you’d be compiling from CVS HEAD, which often meant there’d often be more (unrelated) breakage, so you wouldn’t even be able to continue.
And of course, my system would often be unusable because I wouldn’t have the package installed until the recompilation was done.
And sometimes, the binaries were unavailable because the package was broken or something else went wrong, so one would have to compile a package from source once in a while.
Oh sure, that’s why I included the parts between the parentheses. I’ve heard multiple accounts that NetBSD can be used as a desktop OS, but most of them had an asterisk after them (in the sense of some important program being missing or something not working or simply being prohibitively slow), so I wanted to quantify what exactly a “full desktop OS” would mean for me.
As far as I understand, from reading others’ experiences it’s only a subset of calls and doesn’t support stuff like futexes and other modern kernel APIs, because that’d require more than simply mapping.
I’m curious, could you please elaborate what sort of issues you had? (I’m aware of what ports/pkgsrc is.)
score 2 · canonical
At the time (don’t know if this is better now), pkgsrc had quarterly snapshots from which binaries were built and made available. When a vulnerability was found in a package, the corresponding binary would be removed from FTP. This led to the unfortunate case that one would have to recompile the package from source. And if it was a lower-level dependency like, say, libpng, this would cause a cascade of recompilations of everything and the kitchen sink (e.g. Emacs, Firefox, etc) leading to hours of recompiling.
Because you’d want to recompile a non-vulnerable version, you’d be compiling from CVS HEAD, which often meant there’d often be more (unrelated) breakage, so you wouldn’t even be able to continue.
And of course, my system would often be unusable because I wouldn’t have the package installed until the recompilation was done.
And sometimes, the binaries were unavailable because the package was broken or something else went wrong, so one would have to compile a package from source once in a while.
score 2 · canonical