This power-law distribution happens everywhere, all the time. Most people get exceedingly uncomfortable when they encounter people doing things in a different way, using different tools.<p>Anytime you deviate from the main-stream there are upsides and downsides.<p>Equally, every product or position is a blend of compromises. Understanding the compromises is key to making informed decisions.<p>People who typically follow the herd (ie those in the main stream) can be insecure about their choice - and may need to self-convince by adopting an antagonistic attitude with "others".<p>Maybe you have a different diet, or a different religion, or a different political viewpoint.<p>Or maybe you use the wrong OS, or program in some minor language, or work for a small (old) business, or drive an old car, or live in a small town or.....<p>If I encountered a NetBSD user I'd want to know more about their advantages, and more about their challenges.<p>But pffft, NetBSD? Oh man you've really drunken the koolaid. Sold out to the Man. All the really cool kids today are running Oberon.
I used NetBSD for my senior project (I graduated from college last year). We were trying to port the XFS file system to it. We didn't come close to a usable product but I gained a good amount of appreciation for operating system work and NetBSD which I otherwise wouldn't have gotten. The docs are good, the system feels unified (much more so than Linux ever will), and NetBSD+ctwm runs great on my 2009 Thinkpad (and the built-in wifi even works).<p>But if it weren't for a professor at my college who had been using it for 20 years, I'm not sure I ever would have touched it. The goal of "ultimate portability" was great in the 90s and early 2000s, but nowadays we only really use x86-64 and ARM64. What else is there that sets NetBSD apart?
ZFS on root would be good. That aside, maybe some of the more modern TCP/IP optimisation? BBR, ebpf with XDP, that kind of modernist code.<p>I also ran NetBSD from it's birth right up to the first modern laptop I got that it couldn't drive nicely. I miss some of the robust simplicity of it.<p>When DSDT started not being fully implemented for thinkpads so S1/S2 sleep states didn't work and wifi cards stopped having good blob support it became less tenable. Maybe that all improved after I jumped ship.<p>I also ran pkgsrc on OSX for a while. It's pretty good as a proper portable build environment.<p>I feel like NetBSD the way I feel about nvi versus vim
I remember reading years ago on dragonfly BSD blog about how they wish BSD and Linux was closer together if not even interoperable with each other.<p>I always felt that, that could be Netbsd unique feature, which to my knowledge is something they have some tools out (pkgsrc and their unique kernel) but seems to still wishing to be mostly compatibility focused.
I ran NetBSD on a previously Win95 laptop in '06.<p>One fond memory was when some hardware failure occurred, the screen filled with ASCII smiley faces of random colors.<p>It was also my first BSD. I then ran FreeBSD on a desktop for a while around that time.
> We share a common struggle within the BSD community, and more broadly among Unix-like OSs that aren’t Linux. Think Minix, illumos, heck maybe even big iron UNIX. Linux is now perceived as the default<p>Linux and Minix are the only two "Unix-like OSs" mentioned here. Everything else, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Illumos and especially, but not exclusively, "big iron UNIX," are not "Unix-like." <i>They're Unix.</i> We don't need to apologize for that nor tip toe around the fact that GNU/Linux is not Unix. It's literally what the acronym means.
I asked ChatGPT about why I should use NetBSD instead of Linux, and for me the reasons of performance and portability don't hold up because Linux is more performant and more compatible with my hardware.<p>I can see why some might appreciate the simplicity of the base system and the design of pkgsrc but the former seems to be more in line with OpenBSD than NetBSD and its legacy cruft.