With NetBSD, I've discovered an OS that gives me joy in a way that's hard to describe: NetBSD is neat, works everywhere, and its users are friendly.<p>It's not as well known as FreeBSD (or Linux) but yet you've got everything in a smaller community that's well organized and big enough that you can, share, and learn with them. I like that pace :)<p>I hope I will be able to offer minimal contributions to the kernel: for now, my project is adding an init_flag to pass the kernel to be loaded,and the init run too, like --init-args do similar on FreeBSD or Linux,<p>My other project is about boot time metrics: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/NetBSD/comments/1agmfja/collecting_and_measuring_boot_times/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/NetBSD/comments/1agmfja/collecting_...</a>
My other small project is for metering boot: I'ts just small sqlite database that'll automatically extract tslog boot info to better track regressions, improvements etc: with a kernel that now boots in 60 ms or less, you want very accurate numbers!
I get the feeling I should really take the plunge and start using one of the BSDs, at least as a web server or something. I rarely see them mentioned in job postings compared to Linux, but everything I hear about them as servers sounds so much less painful.<p>Turn as to whether Free vs Open vs Net makes the most sense. My very uncertain guess is Free is the easiest to get used to, and that you can't really go too wrong with any of them without a specialized use case.
[dupe]<p>An earlier link to the event talk page <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220474">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220474</a>
Related slides are at <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZzaW9eI4wmMRGOnJ1uo-kGk5b_UvIOuU9Zgur4au_8s/edit?usp=drivesdk" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZzaW9eI4wmMRGOnJ1uo-...</a>.
This is the first time I've seen the NetBSD announcement. "Escape from the political wars" is an interesting bit because it sounded like 386BSD completely devolved into a flamewar, and this confirms that it was more political than technological.<p>Linus T wrote a book called "Just For Fun", and idk but maybe fun-factor maybe won out.