6 months later

In February this year, I decided to bring my NetBSD commitment to a whole new level and re-installed my ${DAYJOB} workstation with NetBSD 5.1.2.

Good news is the workstation still runs NetBSD (of course), recently migrated to 6.0_BETA2 (soon RC1), and I have no plan to change it so far. It is fast, stable, has 2D and 3D acceleration (thanks to the radeon(4) driver and DRM), I can even play games with my collegues (ioquake3 and friends).

I am the Operations manager for the company, meaning that my job is not only to write code, do IT tasks and use a browser. I must also read/write corporate documents, run some Java tools and do quite a lot of non-tech work. misc/openoffice3 comes to the rescue here, and from next 2012Q3, we will also have LibreOffice thanks to François Tigeot.

Adobe Flash, as always, is a bit messy but “kindof” works. I avoid playing flash anyway. multimedia/mplayer works like a charm, and thanks to gstreamer and pulseaudio (yeah you read well, I am thanking pulseaudio, watch the sky for raining frogs), pretty much everything desktop-related plays sound without any issue. Talking about the desktop, I am very happy with my Xfce setup, which replaced the dying GNOME. It’s fast and I find it classy (mandatory screenshot), it runs on a dual-screen setup thanks to xrandr.

Our Mozilla Firefox is quite up-to-date (13.0 as I speak). Midori and Opera are also available at their latest versions.

The bad: emulators/wine seems to work but mysteriously fails (as in spontaneous app. exit) everytime I try to launch a Win32 app. Yes, some of our resellers tools are windows-only, and I know those to work under wine/Linux. Also we still don’t have Google Chrome, which is ATM my browser of choice under GNU/Linux. Simply faster/better.

So far, nothing gave me any reason to reconsider my workstation’s system, as long as it is a workstation and I don’t use it to play modern wine-supported games. Which is the only reason my main ${HOME} workstation still runs GNU/Linux.