Hello everyone,

I'm a Devuan user but have been playing around with NetBSD lately, an OS that has always appealed to me due to its minimalism and clean structure, which I highly appreciate! I've been following the project for years but so far I've never been able to make the switch.

I did manage to install the latest NetBSD stable release on a Thinkpad T550 but unfortunately it's proven hard to use as a daily driver so for the time being I'm staying with Linux and playing with NetBSD in VirtualBox, which is of course a shame.

That said, I'm guessing many of you will have been Linux users so perhaps you guys have any thoughts?

Some inconveniences that have kept me from migrating:

Hibernation not working (on a laptop that's a big one!) despite having enabled Intel microcode.
Unable to get Virtual Manager to run (see below).
A proprietary Linux package requiring libgconf not working, despite having installed all the Linux compatibility packages (including 32bit). Could be solved by running it in a virtual machine but perhaps I'm missing something.
Some odd firmware-related errors (see below)
Interplay with a local Linux NFS server (am I correct in assuming NFS4 is not supported?)
Establishing a VNC connection over a secure SSH tunnel to a Linux machine keeps giving me a blank screen (could be some compatibility issue, maybe something wrong with the xstartup config.. not sure. Tried it all.)
XFCE 4.14 being kind of buggy, particularly the battery plugin (icon is too big, doesn't show remaining battery percentage, ignores icon theme, ignores configuration, etc). On a laptop, that's a pain.
Not having NetworkManager and its gnome-openvpn plugin available (but at least I learned how to use wpa_supplicant)

And then of course there's the usual annoyances that I won't blame NetBSD for but are just a result of being a hardcore Linux user. Mounting external XFS partitions (e.g. for syncing/backing up my data), not having VirtualBox at my disposal (I admit I've grown very used to it and really do depend on it for certain purposes). Not being used to the Korn shell, the Bash implementation being somewhat different from what I'm used to under Debian-like systems, etc. Yes, it all takes some getting used to!

All in all, it still seems to be a bit too much of a hassle on this system to get a functional workstation/desktop as opposed to Devuan, especially if I'm going to use that system for professional purposes as well. I should give it a try on my HP Elitedesk but that being a server I'm not too keen on that, as I'm sure you'll understand. 😉

I'm posting a few screenshots of errors I encountered.

The issue with libvirt is really odd. It is installed but whatever I do, I just can't get virt-manager to run. It keeps complaining libvirt is absent. At one point I even compiled libvirt and virt-manager from pkgsrc. Same result..

Do you guys have any thoughts, tips or tricks that could help me out getting it to run on a Thinkpad T550 and turning it into a functional system?

Thanks!

PS: my Linux setup is relatively lightweight, I use XFCE most of the time with Slim as the display manager. Virtualization, easy VPN and wifi management are important to me, though. I also rely on NFS a lot. My workstation/file server is set up to use NFS4.