NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.
The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:
“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”
It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions.
Has anyone used a *BSD lately? Genuine question. I have tried one of them in the past and it wasn’t really something that you can use as a daily driver. Have they improved? If so, I wouldn’t mind taking another dive.
I actually tried NetBSD recently with everything default, and it was surprisingly usable. Comparing to my current installation of Void, I found it not so daily-driveable though, at least without learning bunch of new stuff.
My router at home is a virtualized OPNsense machine, which is based on FreeBSD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems
There are dozens of us!
I tried FreeBSD couple weeks ago. I was disappointed. Lots of good stuff but coming from Arch the documentation is… ugh. I tried installing it on my old, very common laptop that has run every Linux I’ve ever thrown at it. After a half hour of troubleshooting the WIFI I found a comment at the bottom of an old forum thread stating my wifi chipset which is very common is simply not supported. Then I installed it in a VM. Installing KDE was weird, the packages were simply not in the repos. Then again, at the bottom of a forum thread, I found someone explaining that KDE packages regularly disappear from the repos, that it’s “normal”. And yes, 3 days later, finally the KDE packages reappeared and I could install it.
Edit: just an example. I installed librewolf just now. This is what it says when you install it:
Everything’s always a problem. Death by 1000 paper cuts. It really feels like Linux from 15-20 years ago. I’ve been spoiled by modern Linux for too long. But again, there’s really awesome stuff. Jails, ports and the Linux compatibility layer are pretty awesome. Also there are utilities to make things easier. I installed KDE with desktop-installer for instance to make it easier.
Oooofff. I’d lose it coming from cachyOS. I’m kind of spoiled.
I do. I have an OpenBSD vps that provides the ingress and proxying for my selfhosted stuff, and vanilla FreeBSD running my NAS and a few self-hosted services. I have an old usff as a desktop for messing around that has bounced around operating systems including the above.
A laptop is the hardest use case for them, but doable if you dont mind it feeling like Linux a decade or more ago. I actually preferred Linux a decade ago, so its fine with me. Ill probably switch my personal thinkpad to one of them again when I have time.
That’s what gets me. I used to like tinkering and fixing things 10 years ago when I first switched to Linux full-time, but not anymore. Now I’m one of those boring dudes who just wants their shit to work so I can get real stuff done. And Linux right now does just that for me. I hardly ever have issues with my Linux run PC. I really want BSD to get better. I like more options.
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Yeah, I daily drive a BSD, it’s definitely not for everyone. Software compatibility and some file system quirks are probably going to be the biggest hurdles. Oh well, maybe someday macOS will be able to compete with Linux.
:/ that’s actually pretty frustrating to hear for me. I really want them to get better so I can use it on a laptop.
Oh sorry, that was just a joke about macOS having BSD heritage. I don’t have experience with modern *BSDs
I gave it a try in a VM , because I do that kinda thing for fun.
I couldn’t figure out the DE install, but I really didn’t try nor do any research.
Compared to my experience with arch or fedora, it’s not something to half ass on a whim.
FreeBSD is actually quite easy when you know Arch from before the introduction of systemd. It also has a massive documentation.
Well, my experience with arch is sloppin’ it with archinstall :
Well damn then.
It was pretty easy for me to run KDE on freebsd following these steps. I’m running it in a VM, mostly just to become familiar with it, so there’s probably a lot I don’t have to fuss with.
It’s basically just install sddm and KDE then enable them in sysrc.
That really doesn’t look too bad. I might just spin up a VM and fuss with it for a bit
@[email protected] is probably right. Again, my expression isn’t “it’s impossible” it’s “you need to pay attention to achieve it”.
I just slop a random distro into a VM once in a while for the lulz. The only thing it indicates is “how idiot proof is installing this OS?”.
The result of the experiment is that FreeBSD is not idiot proof. I got it to install, but I didn’t get to install a DE (LXQT) from the bare bones install. I probably can , I just need to actually pay some attention and read some guides.
The other thing is that I’m installing it into an already weak machine, so putting fancier DEs like GNOME or KDE aren’t going to work out too good.
LXQT is “official” for FreeBSD
https://lxqt-project.org/
https://wiki.freebsd.org/LXQt
On OpenBSD, will probably shift to NetBSD in the near future.
Perfectly reliable for daily driving. I don’t really have any issues
You must be a genius or just have the patience of a mountain, or I may be too far behind with my knowledge about it. Man, I really don’t have the energy for tinkering, but I might mess with it on my laptop some time in the near future. Which BSD has the best hardware compatibility and is easy to install a desktop on? Because when I tried it back in 1776, it didn’t even recognize my Wi-Fi card.
I think I’m just a more tolerant of old tech? I have no use case for really modern high compute tasks and OpenBSD has everything I need. Kicad, Freecad, Krita, and a text editor.
I’m no expert but I’m under the impression that WiFi compatibility has been an issue because of a lack of available drivers. For a long time, some common broadcom and realtek chips required that the windows driver be used for Linux via a “wrapper”.
" Didn’t recognize my WiFi card" was a common problem.
Ah, this is giving me flashbacks to running Linux on a Sony Vaio in 2008
Wasn’t that because the hardware was shit? Making the cpu do most of the work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem
Oh yeah, I’m not blaming BSD at all, I think it’s just these manufacturers don’t even think of BSD when they make a device. That same laptop was fine with Linux. So yeah, it’s not a BSD fault. No drivers and we can’t do anything about a manufacturer who refuses to support a certain os