@moses_izumi @davidgerard @mooooooo I want to mention that there's Gnome and KDE, and there's Wine packaged for NetBSD. FS is, sadly, read-only except for a few basic formats like extFat or ext2. It could be tough/not enough for people not ready to tinker with their computers, but we're talking here on Mastodon, right?
Also, there used to be Debian/kNetBSD and Debian/kFreeBSD, and now there's AlpineBSD that is just getting started.
Oct 17, 2026, 2:57 PM@nina_kali_nina @moses_izumi @davidgerard @mooooooo one key problem is that, while there are packages for these DEs, there are no CLEAR instructions on actually getting them to work. And even with the sparse documentation for XFCE, there are still critical issues (follow The Guide and you get a black screen because the command to launch XFCE also tries to launch X.Org again, causing a conflict and thus kaboom)
@techokami @moses_izumi @davidgerard @mooooooo I guess this is why desktop distributions are somewhat important. Something that is preconfigured in some sensible way, and is expected to mostly work. I only know of OS108, and I don't know if it's good or not.
Oct 17, 2026, 3:09 PM@nina_kali_nina @moses_izumi @davidgerard @mooooooo Or at least some sensible, simple instructions to go from NetBSD install media to KDE Plasma desktop. Won't be as "fire and forget" as a desktop distribution but would give the same end results.
Case in point: on my NetBSD install I did install SDDM and KDE Plasma, but I have no clue how to actually get either of them going in place of XDM and CTWM.
@techokami in case of NetBSD, the pkgsrc is not the part of the distribution, and thus the documentation is expected to be provided by the package maintainers. Some packages do that, e.g. wine package will show a (very easy to miss!!!) post-install message that will explain how to make it work. I think package maintainers are generally friendly and might offer an advice in this case. And I'm sure that this pkgsrc vs system behaviour is documented somewhere but it would be great if users were not expected to read if not the handbook then afterboot from the beginning to the end. It probably would have to have more blogs and guides out there, too.
Oct 17, 2026, 3:22 PMOct 17, 2026, 3:56 PM@lanodan @davidgerard @moses_izumi @mooooooo @nina_kali_nina But there really does need to be easily accessible instructions for this. All I can find online is some broken notes on the mailing list for KDE 4. If you know what needs to be done after "pkgin install sddm kde" please please PLEASE just say it
@techokami sadly I don't, I only run pieces of KDE, and couldn't make it fully work on my install (I didn't try hard)
@nina_kali_nina To be fair, did you try asking about it in the anime channel?
@moses_izumi please forgive me, my keyboard layout was en.GB. Yeah, it's freaking important for modern computing to have desktop distributions, I agree.