Long time, no nix!

Actually, that's not exactly true. I've been playing with the usual things and not really treading any new ground to speak of.

I've been playing off-and-on with NetBSD 8 in a virtualbox VM since May.

It's gotten a lot better (from my point of view). It's almost nearly useable as a replacement for Mint 18 ...almost. The performance isn't really there.

...and it wouldn't be, since there are no guest additions.

There are two tricks I've learned that makes life in VB a lot better for NetBSD 8:

1)SetExtras;
From the hosts' commandline:

VBoxManage setextradata $VMNAME CustomVideoMode1 1920x1080x16 

The "x16" is important. Your instinct will be to choose a color depth of 24, but it won't work. 16 will.

2)Use a custom xorg.conf in the guest:

I'm still working on this (is there a way to make Xorg see more ram? There's gotta be!), but this is what I have to date:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "X.org Configured"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    ModulePath   "/usr/X11R7/lib/modules"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "dri2"
    Load  "glx"
    Load  "shadow"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Keyboard0"
    Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Mouse0"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option        "Protocol" "wsmouse"
    Option        "Device" "/dev/wsmouse"
    Option        "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "Monitor0"
    VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
    ModelName    "Monitor Model"
    HorizSync    31-80
    VertRefresh  30-100
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
        ### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz",
        ### : "%"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "ShadowFB"               # []
        #Option     "DefaultRefresh"         # []
        #Option     "ModeSetClearScreen"     # []
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "vesa"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    DefaultDepth 16
    Identifier "Screen0"
    Device     "Card0"
    Monitor    "Monitor0"
    SubSection "Display"
        Viewport   0 0
        Depth     16
    EndSubSection
#    SubSection "Display"
#        Viewport   0 0
#        Depth     24
#        Modes     "1920x1080"
#    EndSubSection
EndSection

I've also found that setting RAM between 4G and 6G is needed for larger apps (CLang, GCC) to finish compiling.




I've managed to compile xfce4 and MATE; Mate works well enough to use as a desktop.

Most applications I've tried so far work, with some exceptions:
1)Firefox "nightly" randomly crashes.
2)Codeblocks stalls and never completely starts
3)htop doesn't seem to report free RAM correctly
4)closing apps sometimes crashes MATE
5)vlc player doesn't handle videos as well as gnome-mplayer (it's unwatchable).

Again, it's very much a case of "so near and yet so far". All said and done though, after three days of compiling everything (source, pkgsrc) I have a reasonably functional desktop with most of the comforts of home.

NetBSD 8 is still in beta, of course -and it shows. But I'm having better luck with it and pkgsrc (under virtualbox) than I have with NetBSD 7.x, so I'm optimistic this will be a keeper once it's done!