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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

And you can learn how to hack the NetBSD kernel just by reading the man pages. That's how good BSD documentation is.

Those screen shots make me 90s in my pants. That's what a real powerhouse workstation looked like in my college years.

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I had that experience with OpenBSD as well. The summer after university I played around with it on a HP Chromebook 13 G1, fixed a bug that broke it's eMMC storage and wrote a touchpad driver - which ended up working more reliably that the driver Linux had. I think I more or less stuck to the base system + Firefox, so cwm as a window manager, nvi as an editor, etc.

I use NixOS for my own machines these days, but I do miss the simplicity of OpenBSD.

I agree, this machine is absolutly beautiful, great to see it running a motif desktop and gr_osview! Good memories

I attribute that not only to good documentation, but that the overall design is relatively simple and logical.

Are the FreeBSD sources also readable?

Well, yes. Kinda. You need to know a bit about high level organization and structure of OSes first as the codebase is not particularly small.

For FreeBSD specifically there's a book about it that is written by the very people who designed most of it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/2659919

Quite, IMO.

Pretty much, and also there is more documentation for some parts as linux. Not the prettiest code in the world, but ok.

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