[geeks] AOpen makes SPARC notebooks?

[der Mouse]

>> (That's approximately when it became inescapable to me that NetBSD
>> was no longer interested (if they ever were) in being the sort of
>> system I really want to run.  I still run it because I haven't found
>> anything closer yet.)
> What has happened with NetBSD development that you don't like?

They are heading - or at least I see them as heading - in the direction
of "we want desktop share" instead of "we want a system that's
enjoyable to tinker with".  While those are not quite diametrically
opposed to one another, they're pretty close, since getting a
significant fraction of the desktop "market" means working relatively
well for users who are almost the antithesis of tinkerers.

Of course, they also are trying to be a good base for things like
embedded development, which is also semi-incompatible with being good
on the desktop; I see this tension as being part of their problems.

And recently there have been some discussions which I see as being
pressure in the direction of "who cares about efficiency, it runs fast
enough on a modern peecee".

I'm not interested in an OS designed to grab desktop market share.

I'm not interested in an OS that requires a multi-gigahertz Wintel
"incompatible with anything more than a few years different in age from
the mobo" machine to run tolerably.

I'm not interested in an OS that prefers to ease automated
administration at the price of impairing manual administration.

I see NetBSD as being one of those, becoming another, and at risk of
becoming the third.

> It's still my favorite of the PC UNIX, even though it doesn't have
> the hardware support of Linux right now, and I use it on SPARC
> instead of Solaris in most cases.

NetBSD is still my favourite OS, largely because NetBSD/1.4T is still
as tolerable as it ever was, and there is nothing but NetBSD, as far as
I can tell, that runs on what I have.  (Specifically, I have 24x7
machines running the sparc, i386, and sun3 ports; I have other
machines, which I turn on when I want them, running alpha, mac68k, and
macppc, and even, though it's been a while since I tried to run them,
vax and next68k.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B