DarkMatter
Authored Comments
A very informative article on pkgsrc. Thanks!
Poor NetBSD. Too bad it wasn't able to climb the Distrowatch charts with some good solid corporate "community" backing a la Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora, Canonical/Ubuntu/Debian, Suse et al. What a travesty because I perceive the BSDs as more authentic to the Unix philosophy than its sometimes undisciplined cousin, Linux.
Look no further than that SystemD thingy which would never have been created in the BSD world, and how Linux appears to be diverging because of it.
It's a damn shame -- with NetBSD's vaunted portability, pkgsrc, & its free-spirited BSD license -- that more developers and users didn't gravitate towards this rock-solid OS. I've always visited http://netbsd.org/ over the years to keep an eye on the project's developments & to see what else "runs NetBSD". ;-)
Is it just me, or have others here on OpenSource.com ever fantasized -- just for a moment -- a world where NetBSD (or some other dominant BSD flavour with polish) runs flawlessly on low-end, mid-range & high-end workstations/laptops - using either LXQt, KDE, Xfce, Mate or Cinnamon desktop with pkgsrc behind the scenes running the distro's App Store?
I have! ;-)
A very informative article!
When I came down to East Africa over a decade ago on a 2 week business trip from Canada, I noticed there's a huge market here for ex UK/Japan/Singapore desktops & laptops.
A very popular PC back then before transitioning to Windows 7 was the HP DC7600 SFF (small form factor) with a Pentium 4-3GHz processor:
https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-compaq-business-dc7600-pentium-4-3ghz-…
I've been using these in my client's busy SMB shop for QuickBooks POS (cashier, & BackOffice duties like receiving, stock admin, payouts, etc.). Excellent build quality for a refurbed! But since I wanted workstation stability (compared to XP & Vista at the time), I installed Windows Server 2003 Standard & configured them as workstations. Best frigging decision I ever made since it uses about 90MB RAM at startup.
In fact, I gotta be honest here even though this is an open source site...
Windows Server -- for those in the know -- makes an EXCELLENT workstation platform for Office/LibreOffice, Accounting, POS, browsing etc. Super reliable without all the extra crappy desktop bloat.
https://www.windowsworkstation.com
Now we're using Lenovo ThinkCenter m92 & m93 desktops with Core i5 processors. Got those for 10,000 Kenya Shillings ($98). Since the shop is expanding, I've maxed out the RAM on the remaining DC7600s & installed Windows 7-32bit (yeah, yeah, I know...Win7 is EOL but these are not going on the Net & all users are Standard type not Administrators...they can't install anything.) Each slot can be maxed out to 1GB for a total of 4GB RAM. But thanks to this article, I will acquire some graphic cards off eBay since these systems are still in mint condition. Right now, they run quite well on Win7-32bit...no complaints.
Here's the thing though about this Pentium 4-3GHz processor...
After going to Device Manager in Win7, I noticed there were 2 cores in the Processor section. I had ASSumed they were 32bit processors. So I expect them to run very well when I eventually shift everything over to an open source Linux POS like UniCenta. I personally run MX-Linux which only uses about 400MB at startup.
So, yes, P4 desktops make excellent refurbed systems -- if you set them up properly as mentioned in this fantastic article.