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> NetBSD is more of a traditional Unix-style experience than modern Linux. That's a bit of an understatement. NetBSD is primarily about preserving the original

by rahen 3y ago

> NetBSD is more of a traditional Unix-style experience than modern Linux. That's a bit of an understatement. NetBSD is primarily about preserving the original Unix spirit with broad compatibility across both hardware and software. This is the antithesis of, say, Fedora. NetBSD spans a vast amount of history, supporting everything from VAX and early Sun workstations to aarch64 and amd64, and from the V7 filesystem (1979) to ZFS. It will run both early SunOS binaries and bleeding edge software. That being said, what I appreciate most about NetBSD is the dogfooding. Many core developers use vintage hardware or ARM boards, and routinely try the releases on antiquated hardware. Since software behaves like a gas, this helps keep bloat to a minimum. So there you have it: a deliberately old-school Unix that will run modern software yet still work like in the 80s / early 90s on basically anything with a CPU and MMU.

smackeyacky 3y ago
No, trying software on antiquated hardware just keeps you in the dark ages. For those of us that were there when 385BSD and NETBSD were waging their stupid holy war against commercial nixes the purity tests about what Unix really was are just pointless. Unix was always an entirely commercial enterprise. Linux wasn’t.
- rahen 3y ago
  I strongly favored Linux in the nineties because the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. There were no device drivers for IDE CD-ROM drives because "real men" were supposed to use SCSI. There were no binary packages, yet ports were constantly broken. Sound support was non-existent by default. Not to mention the early BSDs were extremely buggy, let alone the train wreck that was 386BSD. Linux 0.9 was already more stable, performant, and usable. A true hacker paradize. Then Linux started transitioning from a patchwork of loosely coupled replaceable components to integrated stacks in the mid-2000s, becoming ironically more and more of a corporate commodity rather than a playground for software freedom. You would need to define "the dark ages", as I understand casual users may prefer this trend, but for me, NetBSD is where the spirit remains. This is an entirely dependable, simple, hackable, grokable system and that's the way I want it to stay.
  - lproven 3y ago
    [Article author/submitter here] > the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. You do have a point there. I found it very difficult to try to get FreeBSD up and running well even ~20 years ago, and yes, up to around the Ubuntu era, the BSDs were just a bit too hardcore for me. Linux was hard enough, but one got the feeling that most of them were trying to help, trying to make stuff work and make it easier. (All right, except Debian. There was a strong attitude of elitism in that community, too, and while traces are still there, Ubuntu has taken Debian more mainstream than any other derivative ever did. Stormix, Corel LinuxOS, Lindows, Libranet... all tried but none quite cut it. Ubuntu made Debian easy, and Debian has benefitted a lot from that, IMHO.)
    - rahen 3y ago
      By the way, thank you for taking the time to review this great OS. This was nice to read.
      - lproven 3y ago
        Oh, thank you very much for that! :-)
    - microtonal 3y ago
      Libranet It's nice to hear that people still remember Libranet, it was a two to three person shop.
      - lproven 3y ago
        `adminmenu` FTW. :-)
  - lizknope 3y ago
    I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough. The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640 The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that. The sound card as you mentioned was another issue. I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers" When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  > Linux wasn’t. (context from me: waging a holy war) That is a bold statement, you obviously were not on USENET in the early 90s. At the time I was using Coherent and comp.os.coherent was being flooded with trolls of Linux users, they were saying Linux was the best thing ever. Linux users were also trolling all other OS groups. Not a single *BSD user posted a troll about Coherent. It was so bad, when MWC folded, the Coherent Developers suggested people move to a BSD because they were at least respectful.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Coherent was my first PC Unix-clone, before moving to Linux. It was incredible for the time. The documentation was bar none... I still remember the 500+ page book with the shell on it. (Coherent ad here: https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/mark-williams-coherent-operating https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/mark-williams-... ... not my blog.)
a-french-anon 3y ago
Funnily, with age I began to think that UNIX itself poorly embodies parts of the "UNIX philosophy". Plan 9 wasn't created for nothing, after all. Thus, improving on the original UNIX (more than what POSIX can do, though I dearly await the new iteration that gives us `realpath`/`readlink` and other important goodies in `sh(1)`) isn't that much of a lèse-majesté, in my eyes.

by rahen 3y ago

smackeyacky 3y ago

No, trying software on antiquated hardware just keeps you in the dark ages. For those of us that were there when 385BSD and NETBSD were waging their stupid holy war against commercial nixes the purity tests about what Unix really was are just pointless. Unix was always an entirely commercial enterprise. Linux wasn’t.

rahen 3y ago
I strongly favored Linux in the nineties because the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. There were no device drivers for IDE CD-ROM drives because "real men" were supposed to use SCSI. There were no binary packages, yet ports were constantly broken. Sound support was non-existent by default. Not to mention the early BSDs were extremely buggy, let alone the train wreck that was 386BSD. Linux 0.9 was already more stable, performant, and usable. A true hacker paradize. Then Linux started transitioning from a patchwork of loosely coupled replaceable components to integrated stacks in the mid-2000s, becoming ironically more and more of a corporate commodity rather than a playground for software freedom. You would need to define "the dark ages", as I understand casual users may prefer this trend, but for me, NetBSD is where the spirit remains. This is an entirely dependable, simple, hackable, grokable system and that's the way I want it to stay.
- lproven 3y ago
  [Article author/submitter here] > the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. You do have a point there. I found it very difficult to try to get FreeBSD up and running well even ~20 years ago, and yes, up to around the Ubuntu era, the BSDs were just a bit too hardcore for me. Linux was hard enough, but one got the feeling that most of them were trying to help, trying to make stuff work and make it easier. (All right, except Debian. There was a strong attitude of elitism in that community, too, and while traces are still there, Ubuntu has taken Debian more mainstream than any other derivative ever did. Stormix, Corel LinuxOS, Lindows, Libranet... all tried but none quite cut it. Ubuntu made Debian easy, and Debian has benefitted a lot from that, IMHO.)
  - rahen 3y ago
    By the way, thank you for taking the time to review this great OS. This was nice to read.
    - lproven 3y ago
      Oh, thank you very much for that! :-)
  - microtonal 3y ago
    Libranet It's nice to hear that people still remember Libranet, it was a two to three person shop.
    - lproven 3y ago
      `adminmenu` FTW. :-)
- lizknope 3y ago
  I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough. The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640 The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that. The sound card as you mentioned was another issue. I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers" When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
jmclnx 3y ago
> Linux wasn’t. (context from me: waging a holy war) That is a bold statement, you obviously were not on USENET in the early 90s. At the time I was using Coherent and comp.os.coherent was being flooded with trolls of Linux users, they were saying Linux was the best thing ever. Linux users were also trolling all other OS groups. Not a single *BSD user posted a troll about Coherent. It was so bad, when MWC folded, the Coherent Developers suggested people move to a BSD because they were at least respectful.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Coherent was my first PC Unix-clone, before moving to Linux. It was incredible for the time. The documentation was bar none... I still remember the 500+ page book with the shell on it. (Coherent ad here: https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/mark-williams-coherent-operating https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/mark-williams-... ... not my blog.)

a-french-anon 3y ago

Funnily, with age I began to think that UNIX itself poorly embodies parts of the "UNIX philosophy". Plan 9 wasn't created for nothing, after all. Thus, improving on the original UNIX (more than what POSIX can do, though I dearly await the new iteration that gives us `realpath`/`readlink` and other important goodies in `sh(1)`) isn't that much of a lèse-majesté, in my eyes.