No, there is nothing really wrong with the OS, but with me.
I’m not the hobbyist any more. Back when I first dove into FreeBSD I was determined to get it. I bought a couple of books, bugged some people on a forum, some Usenet groups, etc. I installed it several times on different machines. Eventually I got pretty comfortable with it, and wrote a series of articles about installing it for those who were even more clueless than I. But FreeBSD documentation is really good, and it’s promoters are generally friendly, and it’s not all that hard to do.
NetBSD people have said they don’t want me mucking about their OS. Their documentation is scant, and if you aren’t an experienced technician, it’s full of ambiguities which will drive you nuts. I don’t complain about the manual configuration, since FreeBSD was that way when I started back with 4.6. But the installation directions are not simple, just simplified. There is no simplified walk-through, and I’ve been told there will not be one. But I tried it anyway.
It took me two tries to figure out how to make the partitions. I thought it was nice you could just dump it all in a single partition, with a swap on the side. I did manage to install, but it failed to write my network settings. That was a bear. In fact, I never did quite understand what was required, and didn’t get it working. It didn’t help I had to make out this tiny 80×25 display in the center of my screen. Finally, after looking all around and discovering I would have to rebuild the kernel to get a full size display on my laptop screen, I gave up.
Before I did that, I realized it was pretty snappy on my Inspiron 4100 laptop, at least as quick as CentOS 5.4, and boots a lot quicker. Still, I’m just not interested in digging and experimenting. It’s not worth it any more. I think I’m going to try QNX.
