This may be a little rusty, but from ~2002 to ~2008, I ran my modest home server on NetBSD. Why did I choose it? Because at the time, I was still living with m

This may be a little rusty, but from ~2002 to ~2008, I ran my modest home server on NetBSD. Why did I choose it? Because at the time, I was still living with my parents and needed to get Internet access working via dial-on-demand ISDN-card. The only OS I found a tutorial for how to do that was NetBSD. What were my impressions? Compared to, say, Debian, NetBSD takes more effort on the side of the user/sysadmin. But once something was in place, it stayed in place. I also liked the clear distinction between the base system and third-party software installed via pkgsrc (which ends up in /usr/pkg). These days, NetBSD has binary packages for the most mainstream architectures, so it less of a problem. I liked the system - it was simple enough to get a realistic idea of what is going on under the hood, even for a Unix-newbie, but also powerful enough that it did not stop there. Also when a friend of mine got me a Sun SparcStation he had salvaged from his university's garbage pile, NetBSD was the only system I could get to boot on that machine.