Does NetBSD really help reduce e-waste any more than Linux already does?
However it goes, the main issue is one no operating system can solve which is modern life relying on the Web and beefier browsers. Unless you want to rebel against that you're probably better off getting a laptop from the past 10 years for < £100 on eBay.
I remember it used to be expensive as heck to do TLS back in 2014~, so much so that we bought accelerator cards and segmented "secure" servers so that load wouldn't hit the ordinary browsing of our sites...
I use a TLS forward proxy. With today's overpowered hardware, I can even run the proxy on an old "phone" (but I cant run NetBSD^1)
This allows the older computers I own to use plaintext HTTP like the good old days
Imagine this, a system which can watch movies, edit texts, create disks, have curl/wget, send and recieve files using piping server (which is a curl thing) , view pdfs, mpv and what not, a desktop manager, file manager etc.
As someone hacking around with the legendary tiny core linux, I am more and more mind blown each day with just how much can happen in 14-21 MB, you can definitely build a mini self hosting rack with just some remastering as tinycore can actually run podman as well (combine this with alpine containers to create a super duper minimalist self hosting things too)
the possibilities are endless. When I ran tiny core linux on my pc and ran nothing else, It took 21 mb in ram for a whole gui with editors and file managers etc. all running in ram so super fast filesystem with a package manager
I personally wanted to build my own operating system to limit myself to the most minimal system so taht I just study and do nothing else, I thought tiny core was it but then I tried to hack around it and there are sooooo many things in 21 mb, makes me appreciate minimalism
I have to say, the sheer fucking irony of this statement made me do a double-take.
I might be showing my age a bit, but I'm still remembering when web-browsing was considered a "light" activity (without extensions like Web Java), and watching a video was "very computationally expensive".
I guess some shift happened in the early 2010's where video playback was hardware accelerated more frequently; and complicated javascript started taking off as Google unveiled v8.
This is their attempt of everything app, where the whole internet would be behind the UI of their chatbot and it would go through an LLM before being changed by it and then it would pass to us.
Your single comment explains a lot really and this is something that I agree. Everything App is the browser/internet, combining it with things like wasm, you can even run whole iso files in browser wasm itself (Its fresh on my mind because I shared it to somebody on HN right now but try out copy.sh/v86 [1])
[1]: https://copy.sh/v86/
Linux (the kernel) may have been ported to more machines and architectures than NetBSD’s kernel, yes. But is all the code present in the same source tree or do you have to go find patch sets or unofficial branches?
More importantly: is there a modern distribution that builds an installable system for that platform?
The special thing about NetBSD is that you get the portability out of a single and modern tree for many more platforms than any single Linux distribution offers.
In any case, NetBSD is not well known and “why bother because Linux also runs everywhere too” so I thought it was worth explaining.
I asked a major employer why they're using Linux + Apache for an RP when OpenBSD + HAProxy + CARP is a significantly better option. Crickets.
I want a good laptop for OpenBSD (or FreeBSD, at the least) that isn't 10 years old or weighs 5+ lbs.
Some architectures are no longer practical with Linux. The kernel might still support it, but distribution support is sketchy.
For a SPARC64 server refurb project, the choices were pretty much OpenBSD or NetBSD in my case.
Once, after accident.
Its also one of few OSes where 32-bit 386 is still tier 1 release.
All from single code source code tree.