7 ms·
NetBSD 11.0
- kogasa240p 2mo agoVery nice, wonder what's the state of using NetBSD as a daily driver?
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoNowhere near as Linux, some can be better than others.
- DaSHacka 2mo agoWell, that arguably depends on your hardware, as there's plenty of devices. Linux doesn't even support anymore.
- shrubble 2mo agoDesktop use is probably the best option for daily driver, since almost everything on the motherboard has support, most likely.
- guerrilla 2mo agoDoes it have Bluetooth, because OpenBSD still doesn't.
- clort 2mo agoNetBSD has had Bluetooth for 20 years?
- ninjin 2mo agoYes, 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. [1]: https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.x-BRANCH/bluetooth.3 https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.x-BRANCH/bluetooth.3 [2]: https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.5/bluetooth.4 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.
- Narishma 2mo agoOpenBSD removed the Bluetooth support they had due to security reasons.
- mghackerlady 2mo agoSpecifically, 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 2mo agoI don’t think a non-crap general purpose Bluetooth stack exists. The “specification” is garbage and the implementations tend to be garbage also.
- hamper653 2mo ago> OpenBSD still doesn't. It’s a choice.
- Gud 2mo ago“Still doesn’t”, is a weird way of saying “OpenBSD removed support for Bluetooth because Bluetooth is not secure”.
- guerrilla 2mo agoRegardless of the reason, it still doesn't have Bluetooth, so I still can't use it.
- roschdal 2mo agoNetBSD 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 2mo agoAs 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 2mo agoIMO 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 2mo agohttps://man.netbsd.org/ldconfig.8 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 2mo agoNon-existent for me on a default install
- tosti 2mo agoWhat do you mean, it's as modern as a standard portable operating system gets.
- imoverclocked 2mo 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 2mo 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. [1]https://www.netbsd.org/ports/ https://www.netbsd.org/ports/
- bpye 2mo agoNetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 2mo agoSome 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? 1. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3 https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3
- prmoustache 2mo agoIt 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.
- accrual 2mo agoThere 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.
- jbs789 2mo agoAs 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!
- jmclnx 2mo agoJust 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.
- cyberpunk 2mo agoThe release announcement has better details: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html
- Narishma 2mo ago> gcc(1) - updated to 12.5.0. Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
- mghackerlady 2mo agoThey 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
- microtonal 2mo agoBut the licensing didn't change between gcc 12 and gcc 16, so that doesn't seem like a good explanation?
- PuercoPop 2mo agoIt 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 2mo 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.
- 2mo ago
- haberman 2mo agoI 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?
- Narishma 2mo agoI´m using NetBSD on a couple of x86 machines now that Linux distros have mostly dropped support for them.
- ciupicri 2mo ago486 CPU?
- Narishma 2mo agoAtom.
- ksec 2mo agoWait What? Atom is relatively new but Linux dropped support for it? Why is that?
- ranger_danger 2mo agoThey said Linux distros, not the kernel itself. Many distros have or are about to drop x86 support.
- Narishma 2mo agoYes, I think the only somewhat big distro that still has x86 support is Gentoo.
- Panino 2mo agoFrom 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 That could open some doors, nice There are some good hardware improvements too.
- jaypatelani 2mo agoCheck out https://smolbsd.org/ https://smolbsd.org/
- dgan 2mo agoi really want to use one on my Linode, wondering if is it possible
- wormius 2mo agoNot 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 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoYeah 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.
- wormius 2mo agoMessing more with it, it seems to be related to the combo of sRGB being less bright/contrast than the non-sRGB modes, thus not enough to see the dots... Zooming in (ctrl-wheelup) on the page causes it to disappear after the dots scale to the next size. Friend pointed out I can disable and test the css, which I did. I scaled to 2, and it's gone. So it's a scaling issue. Then tried Vivaldi, same thing, turns out, it's gotta be a scaling issue with KDE/Kwin. It also only does it with 1440, not on 1080 (or 900, which I also tested). They're all 16:9 so it must not be a fractional scaling issue, maybe density just gets weird or it's the monitor in combo. I have no idea whey I'm sharing just found it interesting in case anyone else wonders or notices.
- gregdaniels421 2mo agoAges 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.
- sanxiyn 2mo agoCongratulations to the first NetBSD release with RISC-V port!
- irusensei 2mo 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 2mo agoAfaik 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.
- Tronickle 2mo agoI hope AI will help niche operating systems like BSD reach a point where they can be used as practical daily drivers
- rnd0 2mo agoNetBSD specifically prohibits AI contributions as far as I'm aware of -and thank god for it!
- jballanc 2mo agoWhen 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.
- jaypatelani 2mo agoWow. Awesome.
- zenlot 2mo ago[dead]
- jmclnx 2mo agoVery 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: https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html
- helterskelter 2mo agoNetBSD 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.
- iberator 2mo agoMoat 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.