Thanks for taking the time to read my comment and respond! I hope you try out NetBSD and give it more time when 10 is released. It's not my main OS, but as I think I said in my last comment, it has a friendly and dedicated community. It's also very much community driven, and therefore does lag due to lack of manpower. Even with all of NetBSD's faults, I'm not entirely sure you gave it a fair shot.

I'm going to do some friendly nit-picking now... ;)

>Sorry if that hurts feelings but it's the truth as I see it, with considerable expert knowledge.

No hurt feelings here, just a commentary from a non-expert on what I thought wasn't a well put together article.

>Not when you have an editor phoning you up and saying "Liam, where is my copy? I need it now!"

I agree NetBSD has it's issues, but your deadlines aren't a responsibility of NetBSD, and I don't see a situation where someone installs a new, slightly obscure OS and then needs answers NOW..... If the mailing lists aren't fast enough, there's the NetBSD subreddit, which isn't as active as say /r/linux, but if you asked a question there you would get an answer. It happens everyday. I mentioned unitedbsd.com because if you google something about netbsd, that forum seems to come up. It's fairly active and people will help you out.

You're trying to come from the perspective of a new user. I would think people using something new for the first time might google it, or try youtube. The second result of a youtube search is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMC3fIj5IVQ an install of 9.2. The install process hasn't changed much (or at all) between 9.2 and 9.3.

I did see the reg commenter who said that they didn't know what pkgin in is. Pkgin is in the official documentation for NetBSD.

Honestly, my biggest gripe and the only thing I really didn't get is how you went about installing it. You said you just followed defaults, but the install is menu driven? After you install the base sets, you're given a menu (https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-exinst.html#exinst...) that allows you to config your network, set a root password, add a user, set up pkgin to "enable installation of binary packages" etc. Wouldn't a new user be interested in what that menu has to offer? Or are you suggesting they would just skip the whole process entirely and reboot their system?

>For non-specialists, all PC Unixes are one.

I wrote a long paragraph here then deleted it; this is one of those things we can just agree to disagree on.

In relation to that, I would disagree with what you wrote here:

> I am writing for a general non-specialist audience of IT people who are mainly familiar with Windows

The Register seems to have a pretty knowledgeable audience, and they must be familiar with at least mainstream linux distros?

>For a non-expert viewer those are minor implementation details, akin to weird arcane disagreements over the wording of different free software licenses. Normal people do not know or care. (Maybe they should; that is a totally different argument and one I am not interested in here. In real life, they don't.)

I agree the average person doesn't need to get lost in flame wars about software licenses, but I never argued that. I'm just talking about understanding that NetBSD!=Linux, just like debian!=fedora. They all have different quirks that would have to be dealt with as you learn to use them. No different that switching between windows or macOS.

I agree with you're article and your comment about Net's documentation and hardware support. But that all comes down to manpower and money, which it has far less of than any linux or any BSD.