I did my "production" on #NetBSD 11 today, running from a USB HDD on a 2017 HP Pavilion laptop (Intel/Nvidia).
I used CTWM. My work requires a lot of Chromium windows and a lot of tabs per window.
I'd say it went OK, but there were issues. By the end of my time (a few hours), Chromium was starting to go a little wonky. I wasn't able to get some sites to load. It would just hang.
And I really needed to be able to turn off tap to click on the touchpad.
1/2
There was nothing about Synaptics in the dmesg, so any hints that reference that will not work.
Turning off tap-to-click just while typing is ideal, but even in #OpenBSD that's not possible, and when I used that OS, I had scripts that turned the touchpad tapping on and off. I don't think the same thing is possible (or easily done) in NetBSD.
Overall I was fairly impressed with how many things I could run (with 16GB RAM) and still have it feel pretty good.
I did enjoy CTWM as well.