As one of those crazy people that actually used to have a NETBSD license plate on his car.. this step was possibly the most difficult. When I installed piwigo, I wanted to convert everything out of my old gallery software (because it was awful) to that. This meant basically uploading 2000 photos into piwigo. This was purified misery through the web interface, so I wanted some software to do it.
Shotwell apparently lets you do this. So I'll install software from pkgsrc. Doesn't work, won't build. Argh. Ok, fine, I'm smart, I'll fix it. Nope. The dependency tree is a mess. The version of shotwell in pkgsrc is too ancient, but the versions of it's dependencies are up to date. Fine, I'll upgrade shotwell. Nope. The new version of gtk and gnome is a hideous mess of hell. I really hate gnome. At this point however, I've managed to upgrade my base libraries to the point where I broke everything.. again.. Now I'll have to source recompile firefox, and this.. and that.. and.. dammit.. it shouldn't be this hard.
Backup the whole machine to the NAS. This is kinda non trivial, and also really painful. This machine has literally been upgraded from NetBSD 0.8 all the way to 8.0 over 26 years. I have stuff in my home directory with file dates of 1993. I was a developer... I swore I would never give in and run the pile of hell that is linux.
But the debian install on ProxMox was really nice. And the VM's just worked. And the PI's just worked. And I couldn't run the Arduino IDE on NetBSD..
So Debian 10 Buster it is.
I have also been using fvwm since the original version (1.2 something) came out. I've had my same desktop for probably 20 years. It actually works really well. But I saw a pretty picture of someone running Awesome on the interwebs.. I must have that...
And now I do.
