well, i have netbsd installed to an external drive and i can run firefox, albeit without acceleration.
i am thinking the existing package manager is a bit... basic. however i also happened to notice chez scheme is in the netbsd repos, so i could just write one in idris.
i think a desktop-focused netbsd distribution (not that i'm committing to such a thing of course) could probably use a new installer too.
aaand i guess i will have to recompile my kernel to try out amdgpu. so totally not a baptism of fire.
@dysfun my dream os rn would be something like Haiku in the front, NetBSD in the back
@joe see what i wanted was SeL4, but it's not really had much love on the desktop and i'd have to be really dedicated to make it work. which i'm not, really.
i am gonna guess that haiku isn't all separated out so you could just easily port it to netbsd - it's binary compatible with BeOS, after all
@dysfun netbsd does have a number of binary compatibility layers, and most of the beos/haiku kernel secret sauce (FS notifications, multithreading, fast IPC) is more mainstream than it was in 1999, so it's tempting to try to do a haiku syscall layer for another kernel.
@dysfun if someone was really going for that level of effort though, it does seem like it'd be better directed in the capabilities-over-microkernel direction than any of the traditional style oses. haiku on redox when
@joe the problem with redox is i worry about hardware support. by my estimation, netbsd is the absolute lowest amount of hardware support that the average person will put up with.
no that's a lie, it's already worse than the average person will put up with.
@dysfun we simply need to make sure a five-year-old thinkpad is available to everyone who wants one
@joe that's apparently no guarantee of anything. my graphics card is like a decade old now and apparently when i've finished recompiling my kernel i can look forward to issues.
@dysfun but yeah it sucks because Linux pretty much just works on anything PC-shaped these days, even FreeBSD struggles by comparison, and everything else is nowhere close
another idle fancy project i had in mind was an nLite-style hack to pare first party Windows/OS X installs down to the bare minimum needed to host a hypervisor that can provide an easy-to-support HAL for alternative OSes to run under
@joe just found this yikes! on redox https://mastodon.minionflo.net/@tranquillity/117439671982595073
@joe as the unwise person who looks set to try and drag netbsd to the modern desktop, maybe you should 😂