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jballanc 16 minutes ago [-]
When 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resources ended up not being enough for my crazy array of tasks, I got resourceful and started gathering every single outdated CPU anyone anywhere on campus was getting rid of or had no use for, and built my own cluster in our lab.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.
haberman 7 hours ago [-]
I 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?
ksec 2 hours ago [-]
I do think all the BSD, despite how niche it may seems are doing well and in an ongoing development stream. And at least they seem larger than Solaris / Illumos, despite some of the cool tech solaris branch has.
All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).
NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.
OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.
I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.
One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.
Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.
As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.
Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.
losthalo 32 minutes ago [-]
I'm using pkgsrc on illumos (Tribblix). So, "of course it runs pkgsrc", also.
aleph_minus_one 6 hours ago [-]
> I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).
DragonFly BSD ([1], [2]): "Am I a joke to you? :-("
;-)
By the way: If you look for a BSD-based desktop OS, have a look at GhostBSD ([3], [4]) (based on FreeBSD) and/or MidnightBSD ([5], [6]) (forked from FreeBSD). Both are under active development.
I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So I put up with the downsides and am quite happy with it as a desktop system.
Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.
I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.
mattbillenstein 6 hours ago [-]
For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.
I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.
toyg 5 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD exploits (defined as bugs in both OS and typically-deployed applications on top of it) are (or used to be) low-value but scarce and hence prestigious.
Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.
sunshine-o 5 hours ago [-]
I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem?
This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.
somat 3 hours ago [-]
On desktop,I use a NFS home dir to a freebsd(zfs) fileserver. But I have to admit, that is not so much concern about the filesystem quality as I want a good(backed up, raid) storage system, and rather than trying to build good storage on all my system I just did it once (the fileserver) and use that as a home dir for almost everything. For instance. I have a laptop that only syncs intermittently to the main file server, but i have never had it fail due to unexpected shutdown.
As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.
And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
I've used OpenBSD for probably 20 years and never had any problem with the filesystem. What is your concern?
mghackerlady 7 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, and the project maintains many pieces of software people take for granted, like pf, openssh, and libressl. FreeBSD is definitely the most robust, and is a very good server OS. NetBSDs niche is how many platforms can run it. If it's supported by GCC, theres a decent chance NetBSD will run on it
microtonal 7 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there,
I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
rustfreeforme 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately AOSP is owned by Satan, which does not seem to be the case with OpenBSD.
I recently switched my router from pfsense to OpenBSD. I wanted a “vanilla” OS as opposed to a specific router OS like Opnsense.
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
Narishma 7 hours ago [-]
I´m using NetBSD on a couple of x86 machines now that Linux distros have mostly dropped support for them.
ciupicri 7 hours ago [-]
486 CPU?
Narishma 6 hours ago [-]
Atom.
ksec 2 hours ago [-]
Wait What? Atom is relatively new but Linux dropped support for it? Why is that?
ranger_danger 2 hours ago [-]
They said Linux distros, not the kernel itself. Many distros have or are about to drop x86 support.
classichasclass 7 hours ago [-]
I use NetBSD on several systems as a small server platform. I find it easier to understand and customize, and it keeps a lot of this stuff out of the landfill.
user3939382 5 hours ago [-]
Things like configs and install locations are always where you expect on NetBSD. It’s quite refreshing. Linux feels very messy in comparison.
mattbillenstein 6 hours ago [-]
I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.
user3939382 5 hours ago [-]
PS3 and Nintendo Switch OS use FreeBSD components.
fouc 7 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the BSDs got an increase in users purely due to AI models making it far more accessible / easier to hack on.
i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
fhn 2 hours ago [-]
But you could say the same about using Linux. Just stick AI on the problem.
skydhash 7 hours ago [-]
I’m using OpenBSD as a daily desktop. The main motivation is that it’s a complete system instead of several projects. So you got simpler userland tools as the kernel interfaces can be easily adjusted.
Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.
Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).
You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.
3 hours ago [-]
bjornnn 5 hours ago [-]
are you asking these questions sincerely or is this just your passive-aggressive way of saying that netbsd is dead and nobody uses it? and why does everything have to be compared to linux? isn't the whole reason we developed free and open-source operating systems is to have lots of different choices and not just one universal corporate-controlled OS that everyone thinks of as the yardstick by which all other OSes are measured?
user3939382 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty uncharitable reading of the comment which happens to be explicitly a violation of the rules of this forum.
It’s natural to use the most popular item in a family as a yardstick.
CodeCompost 6 hours ago [-]
The current status? If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.
But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.
bch 6 hours ago [-]
> If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.
Can you expand on that?
toyg 5 hours ago [-]
Compared to Linux, all of them lag pretty badly in one or multiple areas (performance, features, hardware support, available software...).
They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.
kmbfjr 5 hours ago [-]
Serious like a great file system that is ZFS?
BoingBoomTschak 5 hours ago [-]
And dozens of critical bugs because it's basically the X.org of filesystems, complete with horrible quality C and half of Solaris tacked to it in the form of a shim?
kmbfjr 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think this is the dick swinging contest you want to have with respect to Linux.
Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
spijdar 7 hours ago [-]
It's almost certainly due to supporting platforms like VAX and other, more exotic ISAs. GCC can have weird regressions [0] in "less tested" architectures, so I presume they use a single, known good release across all platforms for consistency's sake.
[0] GCC still supports PDP-11, for example, but for a while modern GCC had some major codegen bugs. Last I checked, the maintainer had made heroic efforts to fixing the bugs, but that's just an example of where bitrot silently renders a target unusable.
washbear 5 hours ago [-]
This is partly the reason, the other reason is that we created this branch in July 2025 (GCC 12.5 was released on 11 July, 2025) and spent a year stabilizing it. A new system compiler is considered far too much of a risky, incompatible change to backport. Especially since lots of C code no longer compiles with GCC 14+ without significant changes.
mghackerlady 7 hours ago [-]
They 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
washbear 5 hours ago [-]
This is not the reason. We created this branch in July 2025 (GCC 12.5 was released on 11 July, 2025) and spent a year stabilizing it. A new system compiler is considered far too much of a risky, incompatible change to backport. Especially since lots of C code no longer compiles with GCC 14+ without significant changes.
Each time we upgrade the system compiler, it requires extensive work to keep all of our supported architectures in working order, and adjust our code for compatibility.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago [-]
Why would the C code no longer compile if it conforms to the spec?
microtonal 7 hours ago [-]
But the licensing didn't change between gcc 12 and gcc 16, so that doesn't seem like a good explanation?
PuercoPop 5 hours ago [-]
It 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 1 hours 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.
hexagonwin 7 hours ago [-]
wasn't that around gcc4 or something era? gcc12 is pretty new
brynet 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed, 4.2.1 was the last GPLv2 version. OpenBSD still uses it (w/ patches) for a few platforms, for example.
/bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
The rest have already been migrated to LLVM/Clang 22 by default (except sparc64 below, that's experimental).
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64
jmclnx 6 hours ago [-]
gcc 15.1 is in pkgsrc 2026Q2:
gcc15-15.2.0nb1 - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) - 15.0 Release Series
As others said, I think it has to do with all the platforms NetBSD supports.
Panino 7 hours ago [-]
From 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.
jbs789 9 hours ago [-]
As 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!
sanxiyn 3 hours ago [-]
Congratulations to the first NetBSD release with RISC-V port!
wormius 6 hours ago [-]
Not 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 6 hours ago [-]
I 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)
gregdaniels421 5 hours ago [-]
Ages 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.
irusensei 3 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
Afaik 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.
imoverclocked 9 hours 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 9 hours 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.
NetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.
accrual 7 hours ago [-]
There 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.
hakfoo 2 hours ago [-]
I did a lot of work on a custom option ROM for the ISA USB card type you mention. It exposes an INT 13h interface, so systems that access discs through the BIOS will work (DOS, probably CP/M-86 or ELKS, Minix might require you to specify BIOS disc access). More sophisticated operating systems that directly poke the IDE registers are not going to find what they're looking for.
2 hours ago [-]
AAAAaccountAAAA 8 hours ago [-]
Some 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?
It 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.
Retr0id 8 hours ago [-]
One thing ISOs are useful for is installation under a hypervisor, or BMC. You can usually do the exact same thing with USB images, but a lot of the UI/workflows are oriented around .iso files.
chungy 4 hours ago [-]
> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write.
You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?
yjftsjthsd-h 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
NetBSD literally maintains support for VAX. Your mental model of expected hardware isn't exactly wrong in the general case, but it's also not exactly applicable here.
Narishma 7 hours ago [-]
NetBSD even supports installing from floppies on old systems if you don´t have a CD-ROM drive.
thisislife2 8 hours ago [-]
I am guessing, but many of us still use CDs / DVDs (/BluRays?) to make backups. It's cheap. Lasts long.
sellmesoap 8 hours ago [-]
Write once has some security benefits as well!
alt227 8 hours ago [-]
> Lasts long
My CD backups lasted about 10-12 years before the silver started peeling off the discs :(
thisislife2 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, learnt the hard way to have backups in multiple medias and that you have to refresh / re-copy your backups every 4-5 years. Wish we had consumer tape drives so that it could be once every 10 years or so.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago [-]
Flash storage can’t sit on the shelf without bitrot as long as CD-R and DVD-R can, even though writable optical media itself isn’t the best for durability.
CD-RW/DVD+RW on the other hand are also even worse than flash in that regard and decay very quickly in my experience.
9 hours ago [-]
saghm 6 hours ago [-]
> 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?
I mean, you could also ask "why use NetBSD when Linux or even Windows is much more ubiquitous and much easier to install?", but I feel like that would be missing the point. Once you're off the beaten path, you have to update your priors a bit about how likely it is to need to support something that isn't as common.
jmclnx 8 hours ago [-]
>Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?
Old Systems. I have one such system that will is in line to move to 11.0 from 9.3. To do that I will boot from CDROM. It does not have any USB ports.
NetBSD is probably the only UN*X Type OS that can run on many of these 32 bit systems. Plus the NetBSD team is doing their best to support these old systems.
That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)
imoverclocked 8 hours ago [-]
> That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)
Seems like a tradeoff with power though. Even emulating hardware from that era is more power efficient than actually running it. Of course, if you have custom ISA cards or something then you are likely stuck :)
sellmesoap 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know about the progression of PSU efficiency, but 32bit desktops were rocking 250-400w PSUs and modern desktops would be hard to find one less then 650w so sure maybe we're more efficient for the amount of compute/W but running flat out will still hit your pocketbook harder on a modern system.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago [-]
I’m in favor of repurposing old machines, but for a lot of the use cases they serve would be more than adequately filled by those little mobile CPU mini-PCs and Mac Mini’s which can go as low as 2-15W and top out somewhere around 60-110W.
bitwize 9 hours ago [-]
Blit the iso to a usb stick and boot it. If your PC is recent (made in the past 15-20 years or so), it'll understand it just fine.
imoverclocked 9 hours ago [-]
> If you are using flash-based media (e.g. a USB drive), please use the .img files rather than the .iso images.
I have done that in the past but there are already .img files specifically for USB. Seems redundant.
Narishma 7 hours ago [-]
Both are needed for different use cases. That they overlap for some use cases doesn't make them redundant.
jmclnx 8 hours ago [-]
Just 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.
kogasa240p 9 hours ago [-]
Very nice, wonder what's the state of using NetBSD as a daily driver?
shrubble 9 hours ago [-]
Desktop use is probably the best option for daily driver, since almost everything on the motherboard has support, most likely.
guerrilla 8 hours ago [-]
Does it have Bluetooth, because OpenBSD still doesn't.
Narishma 7 hours ago [-]
OpenBSD removed the Bluetooth support they had due to security reasons.
mghackerlady 7 hours ago [-]
Specifically, 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
clort 8 hours ago [-]
NetBSD has had Bluetooth for 20 years?
hamper653 7 hours ago [-]
> OpenBSD still doesn't.
It’s a choice.
giancarlostoro 9 hours ago [-]
Nowhere near as Linux, some can be better than others.
DaSHacka 7 hours ago [-]
Well, that arguably depends on your hardware, as there's plenty of devices. Linux doesn't even support anymore.
roschdal 9 hours ago [-]
NetBSD 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 8 hours ago [-]
As 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 2 hours ago [-]
IMO 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.
tosti 7 hours ago [-]
What do you mean, it's as modern as a standard portable operating system gets.
Tronickle 3 hours ago [-]
I hope AI will help niche operating systems like BSD reach a point where they can be used as practical daily drivers
NetBSD is the only thing that made that possible.
All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).
NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.
OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.
I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.
[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881
Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.
As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.
Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.
DragonFly BSD ([1], [2]): "Am I a joke to you? :-("
;-)
By the way: If you look for a BSD-based desktop OS, have a look at GhostBSD ([3], [4]) (based on FreeBSD) and/or MidnightBSD ([5], [6]) (forked from FreeBSD). Both are under active development.
---
[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
[3] https://www.ghostbsd.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD
[5] https://www.midnightbsd.org/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidnightBSD
Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.
I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.
I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.
Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.
This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.
As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.
And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.
I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
https://mastodon.sdf.org
The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.
I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.
The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.
i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.
Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).
You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.
It’s natural to use the most popular item in a family as a yardstick.
But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.
Can you expand on that?
They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.
Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.
[0] GCC still supports PDP-11, for example, but for a while modern GCC had some major codegen bugs. Last I checked, the maintainer had made heroic efforts to fixing the bugs, but that's just an example of where bitrot silently renders a target unusable.
Each time we upgrade the system compiler, it requires extensive work to keep all of our supported architectures in working order, and adjust our code for compatibility.
Patches welcome!
2.95.3 and 3.3.6, both have now been retired in favour of gcc4. The majority use clang now, though.
/bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
The rest have already been migrated to LLVM/Clang 22 by default (except sparc64 below, that's experimental).
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64
gcc15-15.2.0nb1 - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) - 15.0 Release Series
As others said, I think it has to do with all the platforms NetBSD supports.
> 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.
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.
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?
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/
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.
1. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3
You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?
NetBSD literally maintains support for VAX. Your mental model of expected hardware isn't exactly wrong in the general case, but it's also not exactly applicable here.
My CD backups lasted about 10-12 years before the silver started peeling off the discs :(
CD-RW/DVD+RW on the other hand are also even worse than flash in that regard and decay very quickly in my experience.
I mean, you could also ask "why use NetBSD when Linux or even Windows is much more ubiquitous and much easier to install?", but I feel like that would be missing the point. Once you're off the beaten path, you have to update your priors a bit about how likely it is to need to support something that isn't as common.
Old Systems. I have one such system that will is in line to move to 11.0 from 9.3. To do that I will boot from CDROM. It does not have any USB ports.
NetBSD is probably the only UN*X Type OS that can run on many of these 32 bit systems. Plus the NetBSD team is doing their best to support these old systems.
That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)
Seems like a tradeoff with power though. Even emulating hardware from that era is more power efficient than actually running it. Of course, if you have custom ISA cards or something then you are likely stuck :)
I have done that in the past but there are already .img files specifically for USB. Seems redundant.
I was running the R/Cs without any issues, so I am sure 11.0 will be very stable.
It’s a choice.
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.
The same command on other OSes does not cause such damage.