NetBSD 9.2

somewhat. It's been quite a while and I do remember that hppa was one of the machines in my .. pillage pile of plundering (like an sun U1, a U2, an U-what-was-it-60? three flavors of sparc, an SGI workstation and various other UNIX pizza boxes) and my memory tells me except for the SGI we had them all running at some point (might've been hp300, hp700, should've been prior to hppa renaming. Looking at the numbers, hp700 sounds more familiar). The purpose of these boxes was indeed to offer shell access to students for the fighting the lemmings exercises (a series of C quizzes with regression tests aimed at showing students the pitfalls of non-portable programming), and we did have quite the variety.. But memory lies, so no, I'm not absolutely sure.

Haha I didn't notice the reference, that's great!

I, too, loved the old logo. Not being of a nationality that has been involved in the pacific war though had kept the iwo jima reference hidden to me.

They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects.

The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well.

The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird.

Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS.

I liked Beastie as the FreeBSD logo as well, he's still on the page but the logo is now some sort of red bulbous thing, that still somehow resembles the mascot.

> It's called Irony

It's sarcasm. And if we can't tell if something's a bad take or sarcasm, that's a good reason to downvote.

I don't think there is any operating system or widely used software where there isn't a "$group called it dead ages ago" example. it tells us absolutely nothing interesting, and isn't funny.

> it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN.

An alternate understanding is that people are not as funny as they think they are.

I'll never understand why HN hates humor so much. You could say it's dumb humor, but a community that can't even tolerate dumb tongue in cheek mischief isn't much of a community at all in my opinion.

https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying

What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.

Meh.

Sometimes it takes very long for things to die definitively.

"The BSDs are dieing" is definitely a (false) meme but there's some truth to that.

On a lot of things the BSD are either cut out or lagging behind by a lot.

Example for both things:

Being cut out: containers and kubernetes. Heck, you can even have MS-Windows-based kubernetes workers, whereas just yesterday some random guy released an experimental oci-compliant, jail-based container runtime (IIRC). And that's for FreeBSD, does not even apply to Net/Open/Dragonfly/whatever.

Lagging behind: wayland. Mostly working on GNU/Linux, what's the status on the various BSDs? Not pretty.

So to wrap up: it kinda depends on your point of view.

If your use case falls within what's supported and what the developers develop for, then the BSDs are alive and doing well.

Otherwise, the BSDs appear to be dieing very slowly.

> a powerful and versatile package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/)

That's multi-platform as well.

If you want/need the same packages on Linux, macOS, other, then you can use the same code on all of those platforms. No needs to worry about using {Homebrew, Macports} on your Mac and {Deb, RPM} on your Linux infrastructure.

How does that work? I would like to see an example.

Nah. SMP support predates NetBSD 5.0 by a decade or so. May sound like nitpicking but .. roundabout 11, 12 years ago was when the default kernel config switched to SMP on all architectures where it made sense. Before users had to enable it themselves. alpha & sparc64 SMP, I'm pretty sure, is quite older e.g.

I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.