Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > Improved support for vintage and misc. hardware: alpha evbppc hp300 hppa m68k mac68k macppc mips x68k
It is interesting to see that as Linux drops support for legacy computers NetBSD still welcomes them. This is a NetBSD thing as it's not so much for FreeBSD.
As of now NetBSD is probably the go-to operating system for vintage hardware.
by irusensei - Afaik it has always been that way. I remember 20 years ago as I was dabbling with various bsds, OpenBSD was known for security, FreeBSD for features and netbsd for small, ultra portable kernel.by smashed
- Very nice, wonder what's the state of using NetBSD as a daily driver?by kogasa240p
- Nowhere near as Linux, some can be better than others.
- Does it have Bluetooth, because OpenBSD still doesn't.by guerrilla
- Desktop use is probably the best option for daily driver, since almost everything on the motherboard has support, most likely.by shrubble
- Ages ago I know someone did the work to get wine running on a then modern NetBSD, has that effort been kept up, and can it run reasonable programs? Ideally someone has tried it with some success, I am hoping to try running NetBSD on an old thinkpad, but I need some software for a SDR dongle that was only written for Windows, and works great under Wine on linux.
- Congratulations to the first NetBSD release with RISC-V port!by sanxiyn
- Just finished upgrading, went easy. Because I am using cgd(4) I find it much easier to use sysupgrade(8) from pkgsrc.
I was running the R/Cs without any issues, so I am sure 11.0 will be very stable.
by jmclnx - > CD-ROM media
Wow, I just learned that I can still buy a pack of new CD-RW discs. This is an almost 30 year old format that is still published for!
Long live ATAPI!
Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write. Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?
- > Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write.
You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?
by chungy - I am guessing, but many of us still use CDs / DVDs (/BluRays?) to make backups. It's cheap. Lasts long.by thisislife2
- NetBSD even supports installing from floppies on old systems if you don´t have a CD-ROM drive.by Narishma
- > Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write. Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?
NetBSD literally maintains support for VAX. Your mental model of expected hardware isn't exactly wrong in the general case, but it's also not exactly applicable here.
by yjftsjthsd-h - >Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?
Old Systems. I have one such system that will is in line to move to 11.0 from 9.3. To do that I will boot from CDROM. It does not have any USB ports.
NetBSD is probably the only UN*X Type OS that can run on many of these 32 bit systems. Plus the NetBSD team is doing their best to support these old systems.
That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)
by jmclnx - One thing ISOs are useful for is installation under a hypervisor, or BMC. You can usually do the exact same thing with USB images, but a lot of the UI/workflows are oriented around .iso files.by Retr0id
- > Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?
New x64 systems? Probably not. But since it still supports x86 and a whole slew of other architectures[1] still that don't always, it probably wouldn't make sense to stop.
by bilegeek - NetBSD is the only nix I've ever been able to use for novel (for me) tasks without consulting the internet for help; the design is so clean and the documentation complete that I never felt the need for outside help. I love the package management system. Definitely my desert island OS.
- As someone reading this fresh, they are almost apologetic for a release with open issues. But presumably the release closes off many more than it creates. I could see any other author/org approaching the messaging very differently!by jbs789
- From the linked release announcement:
> Improvements to the npf(7) firewall, including layer 2 and user/group filtering
That's a valuable, useful feature
> New MICROVM kernel for x86... it can boot in about 10 ms
That could open some doors, nice
There are some good hardware improvements too.
by Panino - Check out https://smolbsd.org/by jaypatelani
- The release announcement has better details: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.htmlby cyberpunk
- > gcc(1) - updated to 12.5.0.
Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
by Narishma - I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?by haberman
- I use NetBSD on several systems as a small server platform. I find it easier to understand and customize, and it keeps a lot of this stuff out of the landfill.
- The fediverse has a very vocal group of BSD users. Many of them hang out here: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/public/localby wrxd
- OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, and the project maintains many pieces of software people take for granted, like pf, openssh, and libressl. FreeBSD is definitely the most robust, and is a very good server OS. NetBSDs niche is how many platforms can run it. If it's supported by GCC, theres a decent chance NetBSD will run on itby mghackerlady
- > I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).
DragonFly BSD ([1], [2]): "Am I a joke to you? :-("
;-)
By the way: If you look for a BSD-based desktop OS, have a look at GhostBSD ([3], [4]) (based on FreeBSD) and/or MidnightBSD ([5], [6]) (forked from FreeBSD). Both are under active development.
---
[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD
- I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So I put up with the downsides and am quite happy with it as a desktop system.
Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.
I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.
by somat - One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.
Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.
As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.
Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.
by mvanveen