NetBSD: Will It Stand As A Light Desktop?
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Hitting the rarely used netbsd-desktop mailing list on Saturday was a message from Jeremy Read about establishing a NetBSD desktop based upon the ideas of Lubuntu -- the LXDE desktop derivative of Ubuntu Linux.
A NetBSD light-desktop Wiki area has been setup to focus upon this new BSD desktop initiative. There's still a lot of work to do, but it's possible now to use the light-desktop package with NetBSD's pkgsrc followed by then running start-netbsd-light-desktop.
The reasons for doing this LXDE NetBSD version and basing it off of Lubuntu principles were:
- It works for a known audience. (Ubuntu's popularity contest shows 16037 installations and 2779 very recent uses.)Will NetBSD stand a chance on the desktop?
- It is a simpler case than maintaining Gnome, KDE, or XFce.
- It is considered "lightweight" versus more popular alternatives.
- By using outsider's choices it alleviates bikesheds. Let's stay with this decision for at least six months. (No bikeshedding until mid-November 2012.)
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