Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations

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.

  • RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    7 hours ago

    On OpenBSD, will probably shift to NetBSD in the near future.

    Perfectly reliable for daily driving. I don’t really have any issues

    • Flatearth_Habeebi@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      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.

      • RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        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.

      • whosepoopisonmybuttocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        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.