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.
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.