> This is the little slice of computing heaven I currently live within. In a lot of ways it feels like what I imagine employed hackers of old in the 90s were up to.

That does sound like a dream come true; how does one end up in such a gig?

> If only there were a freely-usable set of Unix-like operating systems, with an emphasis on keeping things very, very stable over releases, even more stable than Debian does. Enter the BSDs. Free, Open, Net, take your pick. All of them take a “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken” approach to things, which means someone who started slinging NetBSD installs back in 2007 can probably spin up a well-manicured VM of that 2007 install and reliably make their way around the system, even today, in 2024.

I dearly love all the major BSDs, but that... isn't the argument I would make for OpenBSD, which is quite happy to break things to improve them. For example, replacing sudo with doas - excellent move, but if you go back multiple versions your knowledge no longer works, much like Debian.

(If I were making suggestions, I tend to feel that NetBSD has largely not yet realized it isn't a barely-forked UNIX running on a VAX; it feels much more unchanging to me, at least from a user perspective, though perhaps I merely lack the experience to know better.)