That's a thoughtful question. Let me ramble... 1) I'd say the "fit and finish" is remarkable. But everybody probably likes what they've got with their OS, so

That's a thoughtful question. Let me ramble... 1) I'd say the "fit and finish" is remarkable. But everybody probably likes what they've got with their OS, so maybe that's not worth much. 2) If you're into firewalling/networking, it does have the venerable ipf, OpenBSDs pf, and the shiny-new npf for packet filtering -- and the network stack that held the Internet "land speed" record. Twice[0] 3) there is remarkable kernel research that is going on, that research makes the kernel available to YOU[1][2] 4) pkgsrc is topnotch. And others use it too, so like the famously portable OS, the 3rd party software is tested in the realworld on disparate machines.[3][4] 5) The community is small enough, friendly enough, and smart enough that it's simple to get into and has a high signal-to-noise ratio.[5] 6) Other interesting security[6], virtualization[7] 7) Good documentation, good code (forged by years of portability -- getting code running on so many different architectures doesn't happen by accident, and the lessons are carried on. And to be clear, unlike Linux, the NetBSD code that runs on (eg) a Vax is from the same codebase than runs on an 8-way amd64... versus (afaik) Linux where ea. target is pretty much a rewrite.) 8) I could go on... if you have more questions, don't hesitate, or better, drop in on #netbsd IRC channel on Freenode[8]. [0] http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#internet2-landspeed http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#internet2-landsp... [1] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lua+4+NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lua+4+NetBSD-current [2] https://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/ [3] http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/ http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/ [4] https://github.com/minix3/pkgsrc https://github.com/minix3/pkgsrc [5] https://www.netbsd.org/community/ https://www.netbsd.org/community/ [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veriexec http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veriexec [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Virtualization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Virtualization [8] irc.freenode.net Edit: Match my parens, s/to/too/, link to freenode.