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jballanc 14 hours ago [-]
When I was in graduate school, I was doing a lot of molecular dynamics simulations, but I did not have access to a lot of high-performance hardware. The math department had a 4-node Cray that was impossible to reserve time on, and the CS department had a 16-node Dell cluster that ran SGE and was decently reliable. When those resources ended up not being enough for my crazy array of tasks, I got resourceful and started gathering every single outdated CPU anyone anywhere on campus was getting rid of or had no use for, and built my own cluster in our lab. Before finishing my Ph.D. I had 12 SGI Indys, 8 PowerMac G3 6300s, 10 PowerMac G3 7600s, and 20+ Dell P3 towers in my "cluster".
NetBSD is the only thing that made that possible.
jmclnx 4 hours ago [-]
Very nice, I know how things like this go. You are in a hurry and documentation is something never gotten to. Plus it is a "one-time" setup, to be thrown away when complete. That is fully 100% full understandable :)
I am sure there are other impressive stories about what people did with NetBSD, too bad these really never get published. Things like this would have been nice to show up here:
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?
ksec 16 hours ago [-]
I do think all the BSD, despite how niche it may seems are doing well and in an ongoing development stream. And at least they seem larger than Solaris / Illumos, despite some of the cool tech solaris branch has.
All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).
NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.
OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.
I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.
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.
miladyincontrol 12 hours ago [-]
Ported to apple silicon before Asahi is definitely a stretch, single cpu core, storage "barely" working with several hacks, graphics simialrly.
Iirc they still required the Asahi folk to do a lot of the heavy lifting for device tree bindings, meaningfully functional bootloading, etc.
Even now the situation there is still rather dire even by bsd standards.
tete 7 hours ago [-]
They for that reason also were very very early in the Xen game both host and guest. Back when it was essentially a research project, why before hardware virtualization was even on the roadmap for Intel.
losthalo 15 hours ago [-]
I'm using pkgsrc on illumos (Tribblix). So, "of course it runs pkgsrc", also.
somat 21 hours ago [-]
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.
rootnod3 13 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. My daily driver on all my machines. My homelab started with FreeBSD on all machines with liberal use of jails. Now it is fully OpenBSD and only the file server is running FreeBSD now. All laptops are also OpenBSD, even the M2 Macbook Air
mattbillenstein 20 hours ago [-]
For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.
I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.
toyg 19 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD exploits (defined as bugs in both OS and typically-deployed applications on top of it) are (or used to be) low-value but scarce and hence prestigious.
Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.
5 hours ago [-]
sunshine-o 20 hours ago [-]
I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem?
This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.
somat 18 hours ago [-]
On desktop,I use a NFS home dir to a freebsd(zfs) fileserver. But I have to admit, that is not so much concern about the filesystem quality as I want a good(backed up, raid) storage system, and rather than trying to build good storage on all my system I just did it once (the fileserver) and use that as a home dir for almost everything. For instance. I have a laptop that only syncs intermittently to the main file server, but i have never had it fail due to unexpected shutdown.
As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.
And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.
adrian_b 8 hours ago [-]
Nowadays, the journalized filesystems of Linux, and also NTFS of Windows are quite mature and many of their early bugs have been fixed.
Many years ago that was not true.
In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of computer crashes caused by power failures.
All the HDDs using journalized filesystems were corrupted sooner or later, including NTFS, ext3, reiserfs, XFS.
The only filesystem that was completely unaffected by any power failure was UFS, on FreeBSD (obviously with "soft updates" enabled).
UFS with "soft updates", does not use a journal, but it carefully orders the data writes to the HDD/SSD, to ensure that any power failure will not cause corruption.
Unfortunately, it is said that modern programmers have difficulty to understand the old "soft updates" code, so it seems that it might have not been maintained well, so I do not know whether today it continues to work as well as 2 decades ago (though I have seen during the last year a few power failures that did not have any effect upon a FreeBSD-running computer using UFS with soft updates).
Moreover, even the best journaling filesystems or UFS with "soft updates" can be fooled by dishonest SSD/HDD firmware, which does not write the data when it reports it as written, so the only complete guarantee against power failures is to use a good UPS.
OpenBSD has removed the "soft updates" code from their UFS implementation a couple of years ago, apparently for the same maintenance problems caused by it being difficult to understand. Therefore OpenBSD should be used with an UPS (or on a laptop).
guenthert 5 hours ago [-]
> The only filesystem that was completely unaffected by any power failure was UFS, on FreeBSD (obviously with "soft updates" enabled).
And with "completely unaffected" you mean the internal (meta-data) consistency was maintained, recent user data changes were silently lost however.
adrian_b 52 minutes ago [-]
No filesystem, regardless of what kind of journaling is used, can guarantee anything else except that after a power failure you will get the same filesystem as it was a few minutes before the power failure.
If there was anything written to the HDD/SSD during those minutes, it would be lost.
For better guarantees than this you need special hardware, e.g. SSDs with big capacitors that can maintain the local power supply for a fraction of a second, during which the SSD controller can flush to non-volatile storage all buffered data.
sunshine-o 3 hours ago [-]
This is very interesting !
SoftTalker 18 hours ago [-]
I've used OpenBSD for probably 20 years and never had any problem with the filesystem. What is your concern?
sunshine-o 10 hours ago [-]
I can explain what is my (maybe irrational) fear:
I am working on my desktop or laptop, I get a power cut or the laptop battery run out, when I reboot the filesystem is unrecoverable and I loose 4 hours rebuilding the system and recovering from backup.
So it is not really about loosing recent files but the potential time lost (usually at the worst/busiest moment).
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
I suppose it's possible, but I have had dozens of power cuts and never been unable to recover or lost any important data. Perhaps I have lost some temporary files in a browser cache or something like that and just never noticed. Everything I really care about is backed up anyway, as it should be because robust file systems aside, physical failure of storage media is also a possibility on any system.
The fsck can be a bit annoying compared to rebooting with a journaled file system, but it has never failed to recover for me.
The "softdep" (soft updates) mount option was eliminated in release 7.4 and I cannot say whether that has made the file system more or less reliable but the stated reason it was removed was because it was poorly understood and complex code. "It is too clever for us to continue maintaining as it is."
I've never lost data on OpenBSD+UFS, unlike Linux and ext4 or btrfs. I would rejoice if zfs or hammer2 or some other modern fs was ported, but it's no big deal to run on my laptop.
JdeBP 13 hours ago [-]
For comparison: NetBSD, as headlined, supports Berkeley LFS and WAPBL journalling on FFS.
LargoLasskhyfv 6 hours ago [-]
A long time since I've looked into LFS on NetBSD. At the time reading up on it, out of curiosity, wanting to try it out, I got the impression that it is very experimental, and nobody was really using it in production/as a daily driver. Something about the cleaner-demon crashing over and over again. So I noped out.
Has that changed meanwhile, or is that just one of the things that are still advertised as somehow supported, while in reality that happened in a galaxy a long time sideways, in some Jedi hideout?
aleph_minus_one 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
- the most recent release was from March 16, 2008; 18 years ago
- the most recent preview was from January 17, 2016; 10 years ago
So, despite the fact that the MirOS website [2] has some small News updates from 2026, I would see the evidence on the side that MirBSD is dead, but I would love to be proven wrong on this point.
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 it
microtonal 21 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there,
I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
guenthert 5 hours ago [-]
Among those qualifiers would also be 'free open source'. I'd think there are hardened operating systems which are not much, if at all, talked about in public. Perhaps, in the age of LLMs finding most security vulnerabilities, those are actually demonstrably more secure now than the well reviewed public ones.
rustcleaner 45 minutes ago [-]
... then there's Qubes OS, which beats the pants off AOSP isolation using Xen. Feels like the labelled desktop of the Trusted Solaris days! If one wanted to utilize SELinux in TemplateVMs for further hardening, that is always an option.
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.
user3939382 19 hours ago [-]
Things like configs and install locations are always where you expect on NetBSD. It’s quite refreshing. Linux feels very messy in comparison.
Narishma 21 hours ago [-]
I´m using NetBSD on a couple of x86 machines now that Linux distros have mostly dropped support for them.
ciupicri 21 hours ago [-]
486 CPU?
Narishma 21 hours ago [-]
Atom.
ksec 16 hours ago [-]
Wait What? Atom is relatively new but Linux dropped support for it? Why is that?
ranger_danger 16 hours ago [-]
They said Linux distros, not the kernel itself. Many distros have or are about to drop x86 support.
Narishma 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think the only somewhat big distro that still has x86 support is Gentoo.
2b3a51 10 hours ago [-]
A bit more niche but Slackware (both the 15.0 released version and 'current' development version) have x86 support (i686). Void Linux and antiX Linux also provide i686 isos.
But, yes, we are in the long tail.
boomlinde 10 hours ago [-]
I use stock OpenBSD with nothing else for a web server. Very easy to maintain and configure, very good manuals and very good vulnerability track record. OpenBSD 7.9 was released 1-2 months ago.
I know some people use OPNsense or pfSense for their router and firewall needs, which are both based on FreeBSD.
mattbillenstein 20 hours ago [-]
I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.
user3939382 19 hours ago [-]
PS3 and Nintendo Switch OS use FreeBSD components.
bas 10 hours ago [-]
Ditto for PS4 and PS5.
soapdog 9 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that choice mostly dictated by BSD license allowing them to keep things proprietary instead of GPL requiring them to release their changes?
vladak 9 hours ago [-]
I've been using OpenBSD on my router/firewall boxes (in various forms, mostly i386/amd64 - Soekris or PC enginers but also mips/octeon - Ubiquiti boxes) for the past 20+ years. Mostly because in that area I do not want any compromises (literally and figuratively) on security. I like the Packet Firewall philosophy and functionality. The fact it is rock solid I take for granted. Another reason is that the system is cleanly designed and simple. Quite easy to reason about with source code in hand.
efxhoy 20 hours ago [-]
I recently switched my router from pfsense to OpenBSD. I wanted a “vanilla” OS as opposed to a specific router OS like Opnsense.
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
miladyincontrol 12 hours ago [-]
Running my firewall on nixos these days and honestly I havent felt the need to have to make many decisions. You dont have to pick a firewall on linux, nftables is standard pretty much everywhere. Most the software outside of that is the same you'd be using there, but dare I argue often far more optimized on the linux side of things. Drivers especially so.
Far easier to have declaratively configured and services all meaningfully isolated. Miss me with dozens of root scripts integrated in some web ui or updates that can break the system the moment you step outside their basic expected workflows.
8 hours ago [-]
skydhash 21 hours ago [-]
I’m using OpenBSD as a daily desktop. The main motivation is that it’s a complete system instead of several projects. So you got simpler userland tools as the kernel interfaces can be easily adjusted.
Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.
Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).
You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.
fouc 21 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the BSDs got an increase in users purely due to AI models making it far more accessible / easier to hack on.
i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
fhn 16 hours ago [-]
But you could say the same about using Linux. Just stick AI on the problem.
fouc 3 hours ago [-]
I meant more in the sense that it's less of a blocker if you wanted to use a different OS altogether. Many people are on Linux because it's the most well supported, but if you happen to be on BSD and you're missing something from Linux then you can theoretically just have AI port the thing.
TacticalCoder 5 hours ago [-]
> Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so?
FreeBSD (and all the BSDs really) do not use systemd.
> How do they compare to Linux these days
They don't use systemd.
> How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc?
Security harderning? They don't have systemd. So there's no backdoor in SSH because somehow sshd is linked to some compression library because a Microsoft employee decided Linux should use compressed logs.
Really: no systemd is a big one.
adrian_b 9 hours ago [-]
I have been using in parallel both Linux and FreeBSD on my computers for around 3 decades, because each has advantages over the other in certain circumstances.
Until around 2004, I looked at Linux more like a toy in comparison with FreeBSD, because the latter had much better reliability and performance.
However, in the early years after 2000 Linux has evolved and it gained more and more advantages over FreeBSD, mainly caused by a much greater number of programmers that contributed to Linux.
The first that affected me personally was that gradually Linux added support for a much greater number of peripheral devices.
Unfortunately, after the launch of Windows 95 all vendors of PC peripheral devices have stopped providing technical documentation for their products, replacing that with Windows drivers (or in rare cases, e.g. for network interfaces, they might provide drivers for a few other operating systems).
This means that for non-Windows OSes someone has to reverse engineer the device drivers. In the better cases, there are some standardized peripheral interfaces, like USB, ATA, SCSI etc., but that is not good enough for using a given peripheral device, because most of these have always been full of undocumented bugs and they work on Windows only because the Windows device drivers contain workarounds for the undocumented bugs.
This means that the Linux kernel includes a huge database of quirks with the bugs of various peripheral devices that exist on the market.
Eventually the BSDs were also forced to include such bug databases, but theirs were and still are much smaller than those of Linux, because they have less users, so less people who might encounter the buggy devices, investigate the cause and report it.
For example, I had some Athlon CPUs that I used with motherboards bought in 2001, which had VIA chipsets. In 2000/2001, the VIA chipsets had a horrible bug that caused data corruption on hard disks. There was a workaround to serialize some of the ATA commands, to avoid their concurrent execution that resulted in data corruption. Of course, VIA kept secret the existence of the bug, so who knows how many people have lost precious data because of this.
When I first bought a motherboard with a variant of the buggy chipset, for a Pentium III CPU, by chance I discovered very early the data corruption on Windows, and I returned the MB. I bought another MB with the same chipset from another MB vendor (Soltek), and I blacklisted the first MB vendor (Soyo), after not seeing data corruption on the new MB.
I was very wrong because the MB vendor had no responsibility in this, only VIA was guilty. The bug disappeared on the second MB because meanwhile VIA had updated its Windows driver. So they caused lost sales to the first MB vendor, by their secrecy.
Sometime later, I decided for a MB with Athlon to be my first desktop PC that was not configured for dual-booting with Windows, so I wanted to install on it only a *BSD or Linux.
However, neither FreeBSD nor NetBSD nor OpenBSD worked on it, all had the data corruption problem. But Linux worked fine, so I installed Linux and since then I used only Linux for PCs, restricting FreeBSD for certain kinds of servers.
Only later I discovered the reason why Linux worked, unlike the BSDs, which was because it was aware of the bug existing in the VIA chips and it included the same workaround as the Windows drivers.
I believe that my experience was typical of the positive feedback loop that enhanced the market share of Linux, more users resulted in good support for more hardware devices, which enabled the adoption of Linux by more users, and so on.
Then the major blow that hit the BSDs was the launch of Pentium 4 with SMT in 2003, followed by the dual-core AMD CPUs in 2005.
On a single-thread CPU, FreeBSD 4.x had a much better performance than the contemporaneous Linux, for networking and storage operations.
But the design of the *BSD kernels was incompatible with multiple threads and the rewriting of the *BSD kernels to work with multi-core and/or multi-threaded CPUs took several years, while Linux had already been ported to SMP architectures and it took immediately advantage of the new fast CPUs.
During the first decade of this century Linux took a great leap in performance beyond the BSDs, and they never caught up completely with it after that.
Beyond the fact that it worked well with many threads, Linux introduced during those years many improvements over the traditional UNIX-derived features.
The most original was the use for synchronization of compare-and-wait-for-mutation, a.k.a. futex (2002), which was the correct solution for a problem discussed by Dijkstra 40 years earlier, but for which Dijkstra had proposed a wrong solution, i.e. semaphores, a solution that caused inefficient implementations of IPC for decades (Dijkstra had criticized the use of event flags for synchronization, because of a possible race condition, which was avoided by the commutativity of the increment/decrement operations on semaphores, but compare-and-wait avoids the race, without using superfluous auxiliary variables, like semaphores, but using only a variable that is already needed when implementing things like a message queue, a ticket lock, a CLH lock etc.).
Other Linux improvements of that time were epoll (2003) as a poor man's equivalent of FreeBSD's kqueue/kevent (2000), libaio for asynchronous storage I/O (FreeBSD had used since 2000 an extended version of the POSIX AIO, adding "aio_waitcomplete"; libaio is better than the standard POSIX AIO), timerfd (2008) for waitable timers (FreeBSD had EVFILT_TIMER since 2000) and various means for doing zero-copy I/O, like O_DIRECT (2001) from IRIX, sendfile64 (2001), splice (2006) and related syscalls.
Of the BSDs, FreeBSD has the largest installed base, so it also has more developers and for the architectures that it supports (which are less than those supported by NetBSD and OpenBSD) it normally has the best performance among BSDs, as more optimization effort has been directed to it.
Before 2019, I would have said that for a server environment there was approximate feature parity between FreeBSD and Linux. But then Linux was greatly improved by the addition of io_uring, which finally provides the right way to do asynchronous I/O on Linux, where before this every available method was inferior in some respects to methods available on other operating systems 50 or even 60 years ago.
Now io_uring allows the implementation of high-performance I/O on Linux with much lower overhead than on any other UNIX-derived OS. Like previously with "futex" => "WaitOnAddress", the Microsoft developers remained able to recognize a good thing when they see it, so now Windows has also added functions like CreateIoRing (ioringapi.h).
While since io_uring I would always choose Linux for developing a server application where maximum performance is essential, I continue to use FreeBSD on some servers, where maximum reliability and maximum simplicity in management are more important.
I have FreeBSD servers that have been used 24/7 for more than 20 years, with reboots normally spaced at no less than a year, which were needed only for hardware upgrades or kernel upgrades. In the default configuration, or only with very minimal changes that can be done in a single configuration file, the BSDs are much more security-hardened than the default configurations of most Linux distributions. If you take your time to carefully audit and adjust all configuration options, you can reach equivalent security regardless of the operating system.
I have used occasionally NetBSD and OpenBSD, but not on general-purpose servers or PCs, which are better supported by Linux or FreeBSD. Especially NetBSD is easy to port to various embedded computers (which is of course an explicit goal for it).
LAC-Tech 10 hours ago [-]
I think I could probably live on them. I am actually seeking a more restricted computer system these days... I really don't need DRM or slop apps or games.
17 hours ago [-]
bjornnn 20 hours ago [-]
are you asking these questions sincerely or is this just your passive-aggressive way of saying that netbsd is dead and nobody uses it? and why does everything have to be compared to linux? isn't the whole reason we developed free and open-source operating systems is to have lots of different choices and not just one universal corporate-controlled OS that everyone thinks of as the yardstick by which all other OSes are measured?
haberman 12 hours ago [-]
It was a sincere question and I found your comment quite off-putting.
You're talking to someone who spent a month in college installing every free OS I could get my hands on (including the BSDs). I find alternate operating systems interesting, but haven't played with them much lately. I compare other free Unixes to Linux because I use Linux every day and it's what I know.
It's interesting to think of hypothetical scenarios where an alternative to Linux might be more compelling to me for some reason (eg. is OpenBSD objectively more hardened than Linux? Is NetBSD objectively more portable? etc.)
user3939382 19 hours ago [-]
Pretty uncharitable reading of the comment which happens to be explicitly a violation of the rules of this forum.
It’s natural to use the most popular item in a family as a yardstick.
tete 7 hours ago [-]
I will focus on the things that people rarely point out. Btw. to be clear, I largely use Linux personally and professionally. So no evangelism here.
First of all: The BSDs are ALL general purpose operating systems, not distributions. I just mention this because there is that general "OpenBSD is for routers" and "NetBSD is for old hardware" nonsense. To give you an example. Various things including 3D graphics acceleration for various devices has been available in OpenBSD and DragonFly a lot earlier than in eg. FreeBSD even though FreeBSD for example has proprietary NVIDIA drivers available unlike the rest. People use all of them on server, as desktops and even on gaming devices. It's even kind of a myth in BSD communities that "this BSD is for X".
Something that people who aren't in the BSD users already and especially ones that do use Linux sometimes misunderstand is that the BSDs are independent of one another. Eg. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are as different as eg. FreeBSD and macOS, which is also a BSD and has A LOT of kernel and user space level code shared with FreeBSD. That's why grep -v says FreeBSD that's why docker uses (or used) xhyve which is FreeBSDs bhyve for macOS, which is why you got kqueue and dtrace, etc.
So in that respect "the BSDs" doesn't really work that well and is "dangerously" oversimplifying things.
All of them have a pretty good security track with strengths and weaknesses compared to each other and Linux. I would say it's overall even. But depending whom you ask the difference may very, because even in the Linux world there are different approaches to security. And as anyone having anything serious to do with security it's not that easy to measure security in first place. OpenBSD has a strong focus and achieves a lot on the C side and people who don't use any BSD at all actually and basically don't know it have critical C code compile on OpenBSD to spot issues affecting their actual target platform.
As for development. All of the BSDs increase in terms of development (only happen to know it cause someone once pointed me at an obviously wrong graph). I got a bit interested in that comparison because something that people like to underestimate is that single individuals are still the ones doing huge chunks of big projects. It's insane. Linux kernel might be one of the very few exceptions because a huge amount of people make hardware essentially for it for a living (SBCs and so on). Even if you look at other "big" projects like Postgres and so on which huge companies absolutely rely on it's a couple of people doing insane amounts of work. You have that in all BSDs.
FreeBSD sees a lot of usage as a base for commercial OSs (video game consoles, Netflix cache servers, etc.). However to be fair while some parts come back to the OS they also have companies that shamelessly take code without giving pretty much anything back (looking at you, Apple). Nobody is angry at that cause that's the terms and people in the BSDs often contribute out of the drive to make a great OS.
Something in my opinion greatly overlooked is that FreeBSD has one of the best package bases of all open source operating systems including all the Linux distributions. This is somehow rarely advertised but you have a huge official, very stable, very up to date, highly configurable "repository". I think this is pretty much unmatched elsewhere. It's like having Arch AUR, but without the security nightmare nor instability. In fact getting a commit bit is on the harder side compared to many Linux distributions. Many official package maintainers cannot commit on their own. This means that the "many eyes" does a lot of work there.
You get binary packages with one of the best binary package managers out there (classic case of being late to the game, but taking all the leanings and doing a great implementation).
You get close to 35k of these "ports" both binary or compiled if you want. If you compile yourself you get a huge amount of flexibility. My go to example for this is pick and choose a Postgres and PostGIS version combination, but there are many other examples from disabling adding docs, to optimizations to a stunning amount of third party nginx patches giving you better than commercial version experience. That coupled with a great flexible automatic build tool called poudriere, which you can use to create repositories of all or parts of these 35k ports and your chosen options for different versions of FreeBSD.
I am not completely sure but the sheer amounted of vetted(!) packages is unseen anywhere else. There is a security database, there is deprecation warnings and since the base OS and package separation (maybe the common differentiator of BSDs compared to Linux) you can match stability with the latest packages (or older version, eg. in Postgres), which is something I really miss in the Linux world even though there is nothing that is because of the OS/kernel it runs. It's simply nobody in the Linux world did put the effort in so far.
While FreeBSD has had a couple of not so great defaults - I think maybe to do with how many long term FreeBSD users any ways have their custom configs and trying to be compatible with upgrades - I think it got better. On the other hand they have and had a lot of projects on that front. jails predated pretty much everything else in the open source world, there was the TrustedBSD project, now there is CherBSD which puts a capabilities system in to hardware, etc.
OpenBSD also has a strength that is overlooked in that for a lot of "set and forget" style applications the base OS is enough. You get a highly secure (custom) HTTP server, a custom acme client, a custom load balancer (relayd), one of the best firewall implementations, etc. out of the box. I love to use it for simple I need something so that one can upload files via SFTP to a HTTP server setups. Just run syspatch and every half year sysupgrade and you are good. OpenSMTPD is also an absolute breeze and also having a Go application running with pledge and unveil (basically a way simpler easy to use seccomp) is great. Also for some reason there is a serious gaming community on OpenBSD making things work without wine (doesn't even work on the OS) in a way that is hard to believe.
Another thing is that a lot of "everyone uses them" tools come out of OpenBSD circles. Eg. tmux, OpenSSH, sudo (even though doas replaces it), OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD femail, etc. Also LibreSSL and sndio which always pop up on Linux in the least expected places (like games) for some reason. They all of that heavy focus on simplicity, but done in a non-academical but very real world scenario. They also do a lot of work in the compiler scene on the security side.
NetBSD and DragonFly also have their often very unexpected strength. Eg. DragonFly supports multiple ways of full file system encryption, including truecrypt compatible one. NetBSD while working on a Dreamcast also has very interesting and it runs in unexpected places like the ISS and somehow there have always been DARPA contributions, while in all BSDs at least subjectively the most to NetBSD. Mostly because there I've also seen quite a few pkgsrc (their non-base-OS packages) contributions. pkgsrc probably is one of NetBSDs biggest impacts being using by lots of other OSs from Minix to illumos. And on that topic, Android has (had?) quite a few NetBSD parts (in place of GNU userspace software) and Microsoft took the network stack from the BSDs and Internix (which was the predocessor to the Linux subsystem from when they wanted to be compatible with Unix datacenters, etc.) was largely a modified OpenBSD system.
Again, not a BSD users, and BSD people being very practical and less of a cult they'll usually tell you to keep using Linux if it works for you. But I think there also are a lot of misinterpretations when you used Linux all your life.
In fact the hardest thing on just trying it will probably be it NOT being Linux and also when switching between BSDs. They are simply other approaches to making an operating system. So if you take away one thing from this it's they are general purpose operating systems in their own respect and while they share code so does macOS, which as mentioned is also a BSD.
Use Linux if it works for you, but just for people trying it out: If you wanna actually be able to compare it you really have to use it and get it else you will just be annoyed with it not being Linux. Kind of like when you try a different editor, programming language, etc. Just don't make the mistake thinking BSDs are like distributions. That's a bit like thinking AIX and macOS are just Unix distributions. Even Solaris I think in very old versions was BSD based. ;)
zenlot 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
CodeCompost 20 hours ago [-]
The current status? If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.
But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.
Gud 9 hours ago [-]
I do my “serious” stuff with FreeBSD and my gaming on Linux.
bch 20 hours ago [-]
> If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.
Can you expand on that?
toyg 19 hours ago [-]
Compared to Linux, all of them lag pretty badly in one or multiple areas (performance, features, hardware support, available software...).
They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.
kmbfjr 20 hours ago [-]
Serious like a great file system that is ZFS?
BoingBoomTschak 20 hours ago [-]
And dozens of critical bugs because it's basically the X.org of filesystems, complete with horrible quality C and half of Solaris tacked to it in the form of a shim?
kmbfjr 19 hours ago [-]
I don’t think this is the dick swinging contest you want to have with respect to Linux.
Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
spijdar 21 hours ago [-]
It's almost certainly due to supporting platforms like VAX and other, more exotic ISAs. GCC can have weird regressions [0] in "less tested" architectures, so I presume they use a single, known good release across all platforms for consistency's sake.
[0] GCC still supports PDP-11, for example, but for a while modern GCC had some major codegen bugs. Last I checked, the maintainer had made heroic efforts to fixing the bugs, but that's just an example of where bitrot silently renders a target unusable.
washbear 19 hours ago [-]
This is partly the reason, the other reason is that we created this branch in July 2025 (GCC 12.5 was released on 11 July, 2025) and spent a year stabilizing it. A new system compiler is considered far too much of a risky, incompatible change to backport. Especially since lots of C code no longer compiles with GCC 14+ without significant changes.
mghackerlady 21 hours ago [-]
They don't like GPLv3. The other BSDs used similarly old versions until they moved to clang, but netbsd is pretty tied to the gnu toolchain and aims to be as portable as possible, so they kinda have to stick to gcc
washbear 19 hours ago [-]
This is not the reason. We created this branch in July 2025 (GCC 12.5 was released on 11 July, 2025) and spent a year stabilizing it. A new system compiler is considered far too much of a risky, incompatible change to backport. Especially since lots of C code no longer compiles with GCC 14+ without significant changes.
Each time we upgrade the system compiler, it requires extensive work to keep all of our supported architectures in working order, and adjust our code for compatibility.
ranger_danger 16 hours ago [-]
Why would the C code no longer compile if it conforms to the spec?
seabrookmx 14 hours ago [-]
"The spec" is loose in places and is full of undefined behavior which can change from compiler to compiler. Very low level code tends to hit these types of issues much more than application code would. But these types of issues are even common in large userspace codebases.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago [-]
To me, undefined behavior is by default not conformant, so that wouldn't count for the purposes of my question.
wasting_time 14 hours ago [-]
You sort of answered your own question.
Another reason is compiling with -Werror and hitting new warnings.
Also, the version of the spec changes with almost every major release.
stonogo 14 hours ago [-]
There is more than one C specification, and with each new release of GCC several things that used to emit warnings are newly treated as errors.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago [-]
but if the correct standard is specified as an option, shouldn't that prevent conformant applications from failing to compile in newer versions?
microtonal 21 hours ago [-]
But the licensing didn't change between gcc 12 and gcc 16, so that doesn't seem like a good explanation?
PuercoPop 20 hours ago [-]
It is not a good explanation because that is not the reason. That reason is for Mac OS. I don't know the details, but BSDs normally modify the GCC version they use. IIRC OpenBSD used to use GCC 2.95 for years. Porting NetBSD base to compile with a newer GCC version is not as simple as a version bump. My guess is that they haven't prioritized that work yet.
Patches welcome!
brynet 15 hours ago [-]
> IIRC OpenBSD used to use GCC 2.95 for years.
2.95.3 and 3.3.6, both have now been retired in favour of gcc4. The majority use clang now, though.
hexagonwin 21 hours ago [-]
wasn't that around gcc4 or something era? gcc12 is pretty new
brynet 16 hours ago [-]
Indeed, 4.2.1 was the last GPLv2 version. OpenBSD still uses it (w/ patches) for a few platforms, for example.
/bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
The rest have already been migrated to LLVM/Clang 22 by default (except sparc64 below, that's experimental).
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64
jmclnx 21 hours ago [-]
gcc 15.1 is in pkgsrc 2026Q2:
gcc15-15.2.0nb1 - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) - 15.0 Release Series
As others said, I think it has to do with all the platforms NetBSD supports.
Panino 21 hours ago [-]
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
i really want to use one on my Linode, wondering if is it possible
helterskelter 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jbs789 23 hours ago [-]
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!
imoverclocked 23 hours ago [-]
> 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?
bilegeek 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
NetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.
accrual 22 hours ago [-]
There are some ISA USB cards with custom drivers to support them and present them as normal drives under MS-DOS. Never tried it myself, but they exist and seem to work!
Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work.
On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few with native PS/2 mouse support, and certain Matrox PCI cards have digital out, so it'd be possible to build a 486-class machine with USB 1.1, DVI/HDMI, and PS/2.
Since some Logitech wireless mice support PS/2, one could connect a 486 rig to a crisp digital LCD, use a wireless mouse, and plug in USB flash drives, sound, 10/100 network, NT 4.0, etc. -- all supported. Can make a fairly "modern" machine out of a pre-Pentium chip.
hakfoo 16 hours ago [-]
I did a lot of work on a custom option ROM for the ISA USB card type you mention. It exposes an INT 13h interface, so systems that access discs through the BIOS will work (DOS, probably CP/M-86 or ELKS, Minix might require you to specify BIOS disc access). More sophisticated operating systems that directly poke the IDE registers are not going to find what they're looking for.
PerditionC 4 hours ago [-]
do you have any more info on this posted anywhere? what ISA USB card? Thanks.
17 hours ago [-]
AAAAaccountAAAA 22 hours ago [-]
Some higher-end 486 boards[1] were made with PCI slots, so retrofitting them with an USB controller shouldn't be difficult? You'll still need a boot floppy to actually boot from an USB drive, I think?
It is still easier to find cdr than floppies anyway. I can still find some in brick and mortar supermarkets. Still useful when you have an old car and want to keep the original audio system.
Retr0id 22 hours ago [-]
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.
yjftsjthsd-h 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Narishma 21 hours ago [-]
NetBSD even supports installing from floppies on old systems if you don´t have a CD-ROM drive.
thisislife2 22 hours ago [-]
I am guessing, but many of us still use CDs / DVDs (/BluRays?) to make backups. It's cheap. Lasts long.
sellmesoap 22 hours ago [-]
Write once has some security benefits as well!
alt227 22 hours ago [-]
> Lasts long
My CD backups lasted about 10-12 years before the silver started peeling off the discs :(
thisislife2 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, learnt the hard way to have backups in multiple medias and that you have to refresh / re-copy your backups every 4-5 years. Wish we had consumer tape drives so that it could be once every 10 years or so.
chungy 18 hours ago [-]
> 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?
23 hours ago [-]
cosmic_cheese 21 hours ago [-]
Flash storage can’t sit on the shelf without bitrot as long as CD-R and DVD-R can, even though writable optical media itself isn’t the best for durability.
CD-RW/DVD+RW on the other hand are also even worse than flash in that regard and decay very quickly in my experience.
saghm 20 hours ago [-]
> 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?
I mean, you could also ask "why use NetBSD when Linux or even Windows is much more ubiquitous and much easier to install?", but I feel like that would be missing the point. Once you're off the beaten path, you have to update your priors a bit about how likely it is to need to support something that isn't as common.
jmclnx 23 hours ago [-]
>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 :)
imoverclocked 22 hours ago [-]
> That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)
Seems like a tradeoff with power though. Even emulating hardware from that era is more power efficient than actually running it. Of course, if you have custom ISA cards or something then you are likely stuck :)
sellmesoap 22 hours ago [-]
I don't know about the progression of PSU efficiency, but 32bit desktops were rocking 250-400w PSUs and modern desktops would be hard to find one less then 650w so sure maybe we're more efficient for the amount of compute/W but running flat out will still hit your pocketbook harder on a modern system.
cosmic_cheese 21 hours ago [-]
I’m in favor of repurposing old machines, but for a lot of the use cases they serve would be more than adequately filled by those little mobile CPU mini-PCs and Mac Mini’s which can go as low as 2-15W and top out somewhere around 60-110W.
bitwize 23 hours ago [-]
Blit the iso to a usb stick and boot it. If your PC is recent (made in the past 15-20 years or so), it'll understand it just fine.
imoverclocked 23 hours ago [-]
> If you are using flash-based media (e.g. a USB drive), please use the .img files rather than the .iso images.
I have done that in the past but there are already .img files specifically for USB. Seems redundant.
Narishma 21 hours ago [-]
Both are needed for different use cases. That they overlap for some use cases doesn't make them redundant.
sanxiyn 17 hours ago [-]
Congratulations to the first NetBSD release with RISC-V port!
irusensei 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
smashed 15 hours ago [-]
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.
gregdaniels421 19 hours ago [-]
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.
wormius 21 hours ago [-]
Not about BSD, but anybody else using side tabs in FF with that site? Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section. (Linux/Wayland/Debian). Curious if anyone else is seeing it.
saghm 20 hours ago [-]
I just tried opening it (Linux/Wayland/Arch, and I already had number of tabs pinned to the side on Firefox), and I don't seem to have the same issue. I do have some custom styling in my Firefox though (legacy userChrome.css) and have it using my system theme, so that might cause some difference in addition to whatever differences might be in our compositors (not sure if yours is using kwin; I'm also guessing we probably have different versions of the things we do have in common given our distros)
wormius 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah that could be. Plenty of issues could cause it (though I am using KWin as compositor). Maybe it's fixed by now, or just a glitch on my end.
EDIT: This is weird. My monitor has different modes including sRGB. I had it in a gaming mode (higher contrast, etc...) and it shows then, but in sRGB it doesn't show.
I took screenshots and when viewing there, regardless of screen mode, it's rendering fine, so clearly it must be a monitor issue of some sort. Odd that it would render in every non-sRGB mode, but be fine in sRGB.
iberator 2 hours ago [-]
Moat portable OS in the history of computing.
It supports like 20 more architectures than Linux, including VAX 780 from 1979(!!!) that can run it out of the box - same source codeBASE as in x86 or ARM etc.
jmclnx 23 hours ago [-]
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.
kogasa240p 23 hours ago [-]
Very nice, wonder what's the state of using NetBSD as a daily driver?
shrubble 23 hours ago [-]
Desktop use is probably the best option for daily driver, since almost everything on the motherboard has support, most likely.
guerrilla 22 hours ago [-]
Does it have Bluetooth, because OpenBSD still doesn't.
Narishma 21 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD removed the Bluetooth support they had due to security reasons.
mghackerlady 21 hours ago [-]
Specifically, their old bluetooth code was crap so they chose to get rid of it. If someone wants to have OpenBSD bluetooth, they'll gladly accept patches if the code meets their very strict standards
bigfatkitten 13 hours ago [-]
I don’t think a non-crap general purpose Bluetooth stack exists. The “specification” is garbage and the implementations tend to be garbage also.
clort 22 hours ago [-]
NetBSD has had Bluetooth for 20 years?
ninjin 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, and it is in fact the NetBSD Bluetooth stack [1] that OpenBSD had ported from the 4.2 release until it was ripped out in 5.6 [2]. Not to mention that the NetBSD Bluetooth stack is based on code from FreeBSD.
There is a lot of sharing going on between the BSDs. Most commonly drivers being handed back and forth.
hamper653 21 hours ago [-]
> OpenBSD still doesn't.
It’s a choice.
Gud 9 hours ago [-]
“Still doesn’t”, is a weird way of saying “OpenBSD removed support for Bluetooth because Bluetooth is not secure”.
giancarlostoro 23 hours ago [-]
Nowhere near as Linux, some can be better than others.
DaSHacka 21 hours ago [-]
Well, that arguably depends on your hardware, as there's plenty of devices. Linux doesn't even support anymore.
roschdal 23 hours ago [-]
NetBSD feels like a high quality, ancient relic from the University of California, Berkeley, from the 1970s, made for munks, secret FBI databases and special military operations.
JdeBP 22 hours ago [-]
As someone who has used old BSDs, I can say from direct experience that it does not.
For starters, on the old BSDs there was no Almquist shell, unless you went to Usenet, grabbed the shar, and built it. The TENEX C shell was the hot new thing, as were BIND and Sendmail. And we got genuine Joy+Horton vi.
Whereas modern NetBSD does not have Sendmail any more, has nvi2, and supports access control lists. And of course under the covers has lots of things that the old BSDs didn't have, like UFS for TiB disc volumes and kqueue.
I've heard tell that they're even thinking of finally doing away with BIND in base.
ranger_danger 16 hours ago [-]
IMO an operating system in 2026 that still has a command which, when run without any arguments ("ldconfig"), silently bricks your entire system without warning... is probably due for some changes.
The same command on other OSes does not cause such damage.
shrubble 3 hours ago [-]
https://man.netbsd.org/ldconfig.8 states that it checks the contents of /etc/ld.so.conf - what is the default configuration of that file when it is installed? Is it empty?
ranger_danger 1 hours ago [-]
Non-existent for me on a default install
tosti 22 hours ago [-]
What do you mean, it's as modern as a standard portable operating system gets.
Tronickle 17 hours ago [-]
I hope AI will help niche operating systems like BSD reach a point where they can be used as practical daily drivers
NetBSD is the only thing that made that possible.
I am sure there are other impressive stories about what people did with NetBSD, too bad these really never get published. Things like this would have been nice to show up here:
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html
All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).
NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.
OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.
I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.
[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881
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.
Even now the situation there is still rather dire even by bsd standards.
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.
I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.
Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.
This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.
As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.
And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.
Many years ago that was not true.
In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of computer crashes caused by power failures.
All the HDDs using journalized filesystems were corrupted sooner or later, including NTFS, ext3, reiserfs, XFS.
The only filesystem that was completely unaffected by any power failure was UFS, on FreeBSD (obviously with "soft updates" enabled).
UFS with "soft updates", does not use a journal, but it carefully orders the data writes to the HDD/SSD, to ensure that any power failure will not cause corruption.
Unfortunately, it is said that modern programmers have difficulty to understand the old "soft updates" code, so it seems that it might have not been maintained well, so I do not know whether today it continues to work as well as 2 decades ago (though I have seen during the last year a few power failures that did not have any effect upon a FreeBSD-running computer using UFS with soft updates).
Moreover, even the best journaling filesystems or UFS with "soft updates" can be fooled by dishonest SSD/HDD firmware, which does not write the data when it reports it as written, so the only complete guarantee against power failures is to use a good UPS.
OpenBSD has removed the "soft updates" code from their UFS implementation a couple of years ago, apparently for the same maintenance problems caused by it being difficult to understand. Therefore OpenBSD should be used with an UPS (or on a laptop).
And with "completely unaffected" you mean the internal (meta-data) consistency was maintained, recent user data changes were silently lost however.
If there was anything written to the HDD/SSD during those minutes, it would be lost.
For better guarantees than this you need special hardware, e.g. SSDs with big capacitors that can maintain the local power supply for a fraction of a second, during which the SSD controller can flush to non-volatile storage all buffered data.
I am working on my desktop or laptop, I get a power cut or the laptop battery run out, when I reboot the filesystem is unrecoverable and I loose 4 hours rebuilding the system and recovering from backup.
So it is not really about loosing recent files but the potential time lost (usually at the worst/busiest moment).
The fsck can be a bit annoying compared to rebooting with a journaled file system, but it has never failed to recover for me.
The "softdep" (soft updates) mount option was eliminated in release 7.4 and I cannot say whether that has made the file system more or less reliable but the stated reason it was removed was because it was poorly understood and complex code. "It is too clever for us to continue maintaining as it is."
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=169940176704812
Has that changed meanwhile, or is that just one of the things that are still advertised as somehow supported, while in reality that happened in a galaxy a long time sideways, in some Jedi hideout?
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.
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[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
[3] https://www.ghostbsd.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD
[5] https://www.midnightbsd.org/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidnightBSD
According to [1],
- the most recent release was from March 16, 2008; 18 years ago
- the most recent preview was from January 17, 2016; 10 years ago
So, despite the fact that the MirOS website [2] has some small News updates from 2026, I would see the evidence on the side that MirBSD is dead, but I would love to be proven wrong on this point.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MirOS_BSD&oldid=1...
[2] https://www.mirbsd.org/
I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
https://mastodon.sdf.org
But, yes, we are in the long tail.
I know some people use OPNsense or pfSense for their router and firewall needs, which are both based on FreeBSD.
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
Far easier to have declaratively configured and services all meaningfully isolated. Miss me with dozens of root scripts integrated in some web ui or updates that can break the system the moment you step outside their basic expected workflows.
Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.
Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).
You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.
i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
FreeBSD (and all the BSDs really) do not use systemd.
> How do they compare to Linux these days
They don't use systemd.
> How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc?
Security harderning? They don't have systemd. So there's no backdoor in SSH because somehow sshd is linked to some compression library because a Microsoft employee decided Linux should use compressed logs.
Really: no systemd is a big one.
Until around 2004, I looked at Linux more like a toy in comparison with FreeBSD, because the latter had much better reliability and performance.
However, in the early years after 2000 Linux has evolved and it gained more and more advantages over FreeBSD, mainly caused by a much greater number of programmers that contributed to Linux.
The first that affected me personally was that gradually Linux added support for a much greater number of peripheral devices.
Unfortunately, after the launch of Windows 95 all vendors of PC peripheral devices have stopped providing technical documentation for their products, replacing that with Windows drivers (or in rare cases, e.g. for network interfaces, they might provide drivers for a few other operating systems).
This means that for non-Windows OSes someone has to reverse engineer the device drivers. In the better cases, there are some standardized peripheral interfaces, like USB, ATA, SCSI etc., but that is not good enough for using a given peripheral device, because most of these have always been full of undocumented bugs and they work on Windows only because the Windows device drivers contain workarounds for the undocumented bugs.
This means that the Linux kernel includes a huge database of quirks with the bugs of various peripheral devices that exist on the market.
Eventually the BSDs were also forced to include such bug databases, but theirs were and still are much smaller than those of Linux, because they have less users, so less people who might encounter the buggy devices, investigate the cause and report it.
For example, I had some Athlon CPUs that I used with motherboards bought in 2001, which had VIA chipsets. In 2000/2001, the VIA chipsets had a horrible bug that caused data corruption on hard disks. There was a workaround to serialize some of the ATA commands, to avoid their concurrent execution that resulted in data corruption. Of course, VIA kept secret the existence of the bug, so who knows how many people have lost precious data because of this.
When I first bought a motherboard with a variant of the buggy chipset, for a Pentium III CPU, by chance I discovered very early the data corruption on Windows, and I returned the MB. I bought another MB with the same chipset from another MB vendor (Soltek), and I blacklisted the first MB vendor (Soyo), after not seeing data corruption on the new MB.
I was very wrong because the MB vendor had no responsibility in this, only VIA was guilty. The bug disappeared on the second MB because meanwhile VIA had updated its Windows driver. So they caused lost sales to the first MB vendor, by their secrecy.
Sometime later, I decided for a MB with Athlon to be my first desktop PC that was not configured for dual-booting with Windows, so I wanted to install on it only a *BSD or Linux.
However, neither FreeBSD nor NetBSD nor OpenBSD worked on it, all had the data corruption problem. But Linux worked fine, so I installed Linux and since then I used only Linux for PCs, restricting FreeBSD for certain kinds of servers.
Only later I discovered the reason why Linux worked, unlike the BSDs, which was because it was aware of the bug existing in the VIA chips and it included the same workaround as the Windows drivers.
I believe that my experience was typical of the positive feedback loop that enhanced the market share of Linux, more users resulted in good support for more hardware devices, which enabled the adoption of Linux by more users, and so on.
Then the major blow that hit the BSDs was the launch of Pentium 4 with SMT in 2003, followed by the dual-core AMD CPUs in 2005.
On a single-thread CPU, FreeBSD 4.x had a much better performance than the contemporaneous Linux, for networking and storage operations.
But the design of the *BSD kernels was incompatible with multiple threads and the rewriting of the *BSD kernels to work with multi-core and/or multi-threaded CPUs took several years, while Linux had already been ported to SMP architectures and it took immediately advantage of the new fast CPUs.
During the first decade of this century Linux took a great leap in performance beyond the BSDs, and they never caught up completely with it after that.
Beyond the fact that it worked well with many threads, Linux introduced during those years many improvements over the traditional UNIX-derived features.
The most original was the use for synchronization of compare-and-wait-for-mutation, a.k.a. futex (2002), which was the correct solution for a problem discussed by Dijkstra 40 years earlier, but for which Dijkstra had proposed a wrong solution, i.e. semaphores, a solution that caused inefficient implementations of IPC for decades (Dijkstra had criticized the use of event flags for synchronization, because of a possible race condition, which was avoided by the commutativity of the increment/decrement operations on semaphores, but compare-and-wait avoids the race, without using superfluous auxiliary variables, like semaphores, but using only a variable that is already needed when implementing things like a message queue, a ticket lock, a CLH lock etc.).
Other Linux improvements of that time were epoll (2003) as a poor man's equivalent of FreeBSD's kqueue/kevent (2000), libaio for asynchronous storage I/O (FreeBSD had used since 2000 an extended version of the POSIX AIO, adding "aio_waitcomplete"; libaio is better than the standard POSIX AIO), timerfd (2008) for waitable timers (FreeBSD had EVFILT_TIMER since 2000) and various means for doing zero-copy I/O, like O_DIRECT (2001) from IRIX, sendfile64 (2001), splice (2006) and related syscalls.
Of the BSDs, FreeBSD has the largest installed base, so it also has more developers and for the architectures that it supports (which are less than those supported by NetBSD and OpenBSD) it normally has the best performance among BSDs, as more optimization effort has been directed to it.
Before 2019, I would have said that for a server environment there was approximate feature parity between FreeBSD and Linux. But then Linux was greatly improved by the addition of io_uring, which finally provides the right way to do asynchronous I/O on Linux, where before this every available method was inferior in some respects to methods available on other operating systems 50 or even 60 years ago.
Now io_uring allows the implementation of high-performance I/O on Linux with much lower overhead than on any other UNIX-derived OS. Like previously with "futex" => "WaitOnAddress", the Microsoft developers remained able to recognize a good thing when they see it, so now Windows has also added functions like CreateIoRing (ioringapi.h).
While since io_uring I would always choose Linux for developing a server application where maximum performance is essential, I continue to use FreeBSD on some servers, where maximum reliability and maximum simplicity in management are more important.
I have FreeBSD servers that have been used 24/7 for more than 20 years, with reboots normally spaced at no less than a year, which were needed only for hardware upgrades or kernel upgrades. In the default configuration, or only with very minimal changes that can be done in a single configuration file, the BSDs are much more security-hardened than the default configurations of most Linux distributions. If you take your time to carefully audit and adjust all configuration options, you can reach equivalent security regardless of the operating system.
I have used occasionally NetBSD and OpenBSD, but not on general-purpose servers or PCs, which are better supported by Linux or FreeBSD. Especially NetBSD is easy to port to various embedded computers (which is of course an explicit goal for it).
You're talking to someone who spent a month in college installing every free OS I could get my hands on (including the BSDs). I find alternate operating systems interesting, but haven't played with them much lately. I compare other free Unixes to Linux because I use Linux every day and it's what I know.
It's interesting to think of hypothetical scenarios where an alternative to Linux might be more compelling to me for some reason (eg. is OpenBSD objectively more hardened than Linux? Is NetBSD objectively more portable? etc.)
It’s natural to use the most popular item in a family as a yardstick.
First of all: The BSDs are ALL general purpose operating systems, not distributions. I just mention this because there is that general "OpenBSD is for routers" and "NetBSD is for old hardware" nonsense. To give you an example. Various things including 3D graphics acceleration for various devices has been available in OpenBSD and DragonFly a lot earlier than in eg. FreeBSD even though FreeBSD for example has proprietary NVIDIA drivers available unlike the rest. People use all of them on server, as desktops and even on gaming devices. It's even kind of a myth in BSD communities that "this BSD is for X".
Something that people who aren't in the BSD users already and especially ones that do use Linux sometimes misunderstand is that the BSDs are independent of one another. Eg. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are as different as eg. FreeBSD and macOS, which is also a BSD and has A LOT of kernel and user space level code shared with FreeBSD. That's why grep -v says FreeBSD that's why docker uses (or used) xhyve which is FreeBSDs bhyve for macOS, which is why you got kqueue and dtrace, etc.
So in that respect "the BSDs" doesn't really work that well and is "dangerously" oversimplifying things.
All of them have a pretty good security track with strengths and weaknesses compared to each other and Linux. I would say it's overall even. But depending whom you ask the difference may very, because even in the Linux world there are different approaches to security. And as anyone having anything serious to do with security it's not that easy to measure security in first place. OpenBSD has a strong focus and achieves a lot on the C side and people who don't use any BSD at all actually and basically don't know it have critical C code compile on OpenBSD to spot issues affecting their actual target platform.
As for development. All of the BSDs increase in terms of development (only happen to know it cause someone once pointed me at an obviously wrong graph). I got a bit interested in that comparison because something that people like to underestimate is that single individuals are still the ones doing huge chunks of big projects. It's insane. Linux kernel might be one of the very few exceptions because a huge amount of people make hardware essentially for it for a living (SBCs and so on). Even if you look at other "big" projects like Postgres and so on which huge companies absolutely rely on it's a couple of people doing insane amounts of work. You have that in all BSDs.
FreeBSD sees a lot of usage as a base for commercial OSs (video game consoles, Netflix cache servers, etc.). However to be fair while some parts come back to the OS they also have companies that shamelessly take code without giving pretty much anything back (looking at you, Apple). Nobody is angry at that cause that's the terms and people in the BSDs often contribute out of the drive to make a great OS.
Something in my opinion greatly overlooked is that FreeBSD has one of the best package bases of all open source operating systems including all the Linux distributions. This is somehow rarely advertised but you have a huge official, very stable, very up to date, highly configurable "repository". I think this is pretty much unmatched elsewhere. It's like having Arch AUR, but without the security nightmare nor instability. In fact getting a commit bit is on the harder side compared to many Linux distributions. Many official package maintainers cannot commit on their own. This means that the "many eyes" does a lot of work there.
You get binary packages with one of the best binary package managers out there (classic case of being late to the game, but taking all the leanings and doing a great implementation).
You get close to 35k of these "ports" both binary or compiled if you want. If you compile yourself you get a huge amount of flexibility. My go to example for this is pick and choose a Postgres and PostGIS version combination, but there are many other examples from disabling adding docs, to optimizations to a stunning amount of third party nginx patches giving you better than commercial version experience. That coupled with a great flexible automatic build tool called poudriere, which you can use to create repositories of all or parts of these 35k ports and your chosen options for different versions of FreeBSD.
I am not completely sure but the sheer amounted of vetted(!) packages is unseen anywhere else. There is a security database, there is deprecation warnings and since the base OS and package separation (maybe the common differentiator of BSDs compared to Linux) you can match stability with the latest packages (or older version, eg. in Postgres), which is something I really miss in the Linux world even though there is nothing that is because of the OS/kernel it runs. It's simply nobody in the Linux world did put the effort in so far.
While FreeBSD has had a couple of not so great defaults - I think maybe to do with how many long term FreeBSD users any ways have their custom configs and trying to be compatible with upgrades - I think it got better. On the other hand they have and had a lot of projects on that front. jails predated pretty much everything else in the open source world, there was the TrustedBSD project, now there is CherBSD which puts a capabilities system in to hardware, etc.
OpenBSD also has a strength that is overlooked in that for a lot of "set and forget" style applications the base OS is enough. You get a highly secure (custom) HTTP server, a custom acme client, a custom load balancer (relayd), one of the best firewall implementations, etc. out of the box. I love to use it for simple I need something so that one can upload files via SFTP to a HTTP server setups. Just run syspatch and every half year sysupgrade and you are good. OpenSMTPD is also an absolute breeze and also having a Go application running with pledge and unveil (basically a way simpler easy to use seccomp) is great. Also for some reason there is a serious gaming community on OpenBSD making things work without wine (doesn't even work on the OS) in a way that is hard to believe.
Another thing is that a lot of "everyone uses them" tools come out of OpenBSD circles. Eg. tmux, OpenSSH, sudo (even though doas replaces it), OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD femail, etc. Also LibreSSL and sndio which always pop up on Linux in the least expected places (like games) for some reason. They all of that heavy focus on simplicity, but done in a non-academical but very real world scenario. They also do a lot of work in the compiler scene on the security side.
NetBSD and DragonFly also have their often very unexpected strength. Eg. DragonFly supports multiple ways of full file system encryption, including truecrypt compatible one. NetBSD while working on a Dreamcast also has very interesting and it runs in unexpected places like the ISS and somehow there have always been DARPA contributions, while in all BSDs at least subjectively the most to NetBSD. Mostly because there I've also seen quite a few pkgsrc (their non-base-OS packages) contributions. pkgsrc probably is one of NetBSDs biggest impacts being using by lots of other OSs from Minix to illumos. And on that topic, Android has (had?) quite a few NetBSD parts (in place of GNU userspace software) and Microsoft took the network stack from the BSDs and Internix (which was the predocessor to the Linux subsystem from when they wanted to be compatible with Unix datacenters, etc.) was largely a modified OpenBSD system.
Again, not a BSD users, and BSD people being very practical and less of a cult they'll usually tell you to keep using Linux if it works for you. But I think there also are a lot of misinterpretations when you used Linux all your life.
In fact the hardest thing on just trying it will probably be it NOT being Linux and also when switching between BSDs. They are simply other approaches to making an operating system. So if you take away one thing from this it's they are general purpose operating systems in their own respect and while they share code so does macOS, which as mentioned is also a BSD.
Use Linux if it works for you, but just for people trying it out: If you wanna actually be able to compare it you really have to use it and get it else you will just be annoyed with it not being Linux. Kind of like when you try a different editor, programming language, etc. Just don't make the mistake thinking BSDs are like distributions. That's a bit like thinking AIX and macOS are just Unix distributions. Even Solaris I think in very old versions was BSD based. ;)
But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.
Can you expand on that?
They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.
You should read up on it. ZFS is great.
Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
[0] GCC still supports PDP-11, for example, but for a while modern GCC had some major codegen bugs. Last I checked, the maintainer had made heroic efforts to fixing the bugs, but that's just an example of where bitrot silently renders a target unusable.
Each time we upgrade the system compiler, it requires extensive work to keep all of our supported architectures in working order, and adjust our code for compatibility.
Another reason is compiling with -Werror and hitting new warnings.
Also, the version of the spec changes with almost every major release.
Patches welcome!
2.95.3 and 3.3.6, both have now been retired in favour of gcc4. The majority use clang now, though.
/bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
The rest have already been migrated to LLVM/Clang 22 by default (except sparc64 below, that's experimental).
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64
gcc15-15.2.0nb1 - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) - 15.0 Release Series
As others said, I think it has to do with all the platforms NetBSD supports.
> 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.
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?
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.
[1]https://www.netbsd.org/ports/
Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work.
On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few with native PS/2 mouse support, and certain Matrox PCI cards have digital out, so it'd be possible to build a 486-class machine with USB 1.1, DVI/HDMI, and PS/2.
Since some Logitech wireless mice support PS/2, one could connect a 486 rig to a crisp digital LCD, use a wireless mouse, and plug in USB flash drives, sound, 10/100 network, NT 4.0, etc. -- all supported. Can make a fairly "modern" machine out of a pre-Pentium chip.
1. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3
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.
My CD backups lasted about 10-12 years before the silver started peeling off the discs :(
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?
CD-RW/DVD+RW on the other hand are also even worse than flash in that regard and decay very quickly in my experience.
I mean, you could also ask "why use NetBSD when Linux or even Windows is much more ubiquitous and much easier to install?", but I feel like that would be missing the point. Once you're off the beaten path, you have to update your priors a bit about how likely it is to need to support something that isn't as common.
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 :)
Seems like a tradeoff with power though. Even emulating hardware from that era is more power efficient than actually running it. Of course, if you have custom ISA cards or something then you are likely stuck :)
I have done that in the past but there are already .img files specifically for USB. Seems redundant.
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.
EDIT: This is weird. My monitor has different modes including sRGB. I had it in a gaming mode (higher contrast, etc...) and it shows then, but in sRGB it doesn't show.
I took screenshots and when viewing there, regardless of screen mode, it's rendering fine, so clearly it must be a monitor issue of some sort. Odd that it would render in every non-sRGB mode, but be fine in sRGB.
I was running the R/Cs without any issues, so I am sure 11.0 will be very stable.
[1]: https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.x-BRANCH/bluetooth.3
[2]: https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4
There is a lot of sharing going on between the BSDs. Most commonly drivers being handed back and forth.
It’s a choice.
For starters, on the old BSDs there was no Almquist shell, unless you went to Usenet, grabbed the shar, and built it. The TENEX C shell was the hot new thing, as were BIND and Sendmail. And we got genuine Joy+Horton vi.
Whereas modern NetBSD does not have Sendmail any more, has nvi2, and supports access control lists. And of course under the covers has lots of things that the old BSDs didn't have, like UFS for TiB disc volumes and kqueue.
I've heard tell that they're even thinking of finally doing away with BIND in base.
The same command on other OSes does not cause such damage.