I think there are basically 2 types of open source OSses, those that are designed for the desktop and those that are not.
The first case is for example Syllable and Haiku OS. Syllable is not actively maintained anymore and it is far from stable. Haiku is in a pretty good shape but but it is not yet completely stable and lacks support for ARM for example, which we have. The second case is Linux and the BSDs. NetBSD, among others, is very mature, fast and supports a lot of hardware. There is however no GUI stack, but you have the choise between 1000 of different crazy "desktop environments", which themselves rely on many different toolkits and environmental services. You can´t speak of a desktop OS because everything looks and behaves completely different. There is also often no good vertical integration with the OS underneath. That is exactly why "Linux on the desktop" never got any relevance, because neither administrators nor users can handle it if no Linux installation is equal to another. What I´m thinking about is to "steal" the UI layer (appserver, toolkit, basic apps) from Syllable or Haiku and make it work on top of NetBSD. I grabbed Syllable´s source and applied many C++ fixes to libsyllable, registrar and the appserver in order to make these compile. That´s already working. I can´t link anything though because some interfaces differ (threding, semaphores) and some stuff that we don´t have (message passing, among others). Haiku is probably better, because of its license (MIT vs. GPL) and it is actively maintained - but I just wanted to see how far I could get investing a few hours. 2015-02-17 14:24 GMT+01:00 Mayuresh <mayur...@acm.org>: > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 01:29:11PM +0100, Stephan wrote: >> Is there anyone still interested in bringing NetBSD to the desktop? > > I use NetBSD on desktops and laptops. > > What specific characteristics do you think NetBSD needs to "bring" it to > desktop? (Also, I didn't get "still" part of it.) > > Mayuresh