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Comment by frr149 | Hacker News Reader

For someone used to Linux, what are the selling points of NetBSD?

One neat thing is the rump kernel.

I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.

NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.

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

That was a while ago, but docs were great and easy to follow. I have not needed to try rump in a while so all forgotten.

Aside from the obvious BSD things (clean separation of base and third-party software, very different networking stack, etc), notable NetBSD things include a lot more security and hardening features enabled by default, a powerful and versatile default package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.

> 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.

A long time ago I maintained my own Linux from Scratch [1] installation using pkgsrc rather than BLFS or something ad hoc. It worked surprisingly well. It was a bit like Gentoo (whih is what I had migrated from.) Fun times!

[1] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/

TL;DR: Odds are though if you installed NetBSD, once you got past the learning curve (less than a week) it is about as different from any Linux as Debian is from Fedora - enough things to be annoying, but not enough that you notice most of the time.

Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use.

If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there.

Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).

Lean and mean!

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