Well... It took a lot of time, research, trial/error and testing NetBSD as a virtual machine but I just wanted to let you all know that I've finally set up a functional NetBSD system on my X250! I'm running NetBSD 9.1 with current packages and an encrypted swap+home (took a while to figure out how to pull that off and had to do some command-line kungfu to get around some stupid errors of my very own fault, but I did it!).
I'm running LXQT (+Kvantum) as a desktop since I tend to use QT applications a lot. On Linux I tend to use a bare-bones, stripped-down KDE Plasma on Linux (without those Korganizer apps or daemons and most desktop effects disabled, it's as good as XFCE for me performance-wise).
I decided to look into NetBSD again because I've "upgraded" my skills in recent times to the point where I typically set up my machines manually and write my own perl scripts to get stuff done. I ditched VirtualBox for good and don't use any type of network manager anymore. Just manually configuring dhclient
/dhcpcd
, interfaces
, wpa_supplicant
, openvpn
and the likes. It feels liberating.
There are some good Linux distros out there that are bloatware-free or can easily be unbloated but overall I'm just kind of unhappy with the way things are going in Linux land and NetBSD has always been very attractive to me in that sense. Clean design, simple, very configurable. There's a learning curve to it but I figure if you want to achieve anything, you have to put in some effort. It's only a matter of "getting the hang of it", I guess. Same with Linux which I've used for years.
Anyway, many thanks for all the tips and tricks you guys have been posting on this forum. That along with the official NetBSD Guide have been really helpful to me. I'm keeping lots of notes along the way so I might be sharing some of those in the time to come. Still got lots of things to figure out, test, or get used to... Firewall, virtualization, managing removable media. Though there's NFS
/SSH
/SFTP
/rsync
etc to bypass any such issues.
It's almost as though I'm learning UNIX all over again but I guess that says something about the state of Linux these days. 🤔
My only major frustration though: what's with LibreOffice7 looking so awful? This will make me want to go back to Windows! 😅😅😅
Okay, just kidding. About it being major and going back to Windows, that is.
Cheers.