Reflections on NetBSD 11 | Hacker News Reader

Reflections on NetBSD 11

9 pointsmorpheos1376 comments

I have been a user of openbsd for years. recently due to hardware failure and poor support of my replacement hardware on openbsd i decided to give NetBSD a try. What a mistake. Nothing just works.

Commands fail or hang with no visible error.

SSH does not pass the local terminal to remote (never had experienced terminal degradation just from ssh before)

Normal keys like backspace and arrow do not work by default.

Select to copy from xterm to ssh xterm is broken.

Launching certain shell commands having to do with set in xterm brings down the whole xserver.

firefox brings down the whole xserver inexplicably

no installurl default to add packages from.

su keeps the user's environment.

just an all around pile of garbage if you are looking for something you can set up and work with without hours of tinkering.

in contrast if you set up openbsd it WORKS out of the box and what needs to be configured is logical and documented.

I can see no benefit in an OS that is unusable for productive work by default.

looking for specific help with a normal terminal

ssh to remote without buggering the terminal

select to paste between xterm windows

normal keyboard operations

firefox not locking or crashing x. this is another thing: firefox on openbsd does not lock x. on my netbsd system while firefox is launching all other windows in x are frozen.

OP here. I solved all my problems but the point is in OpenBSD and in my experience linux these would not be problems in a default install. Any now that it is meeting my needs happy with netbsd.

Maybe the best use case for NetBSD is something you haven't tried yet? The kernel support for Lua seems awesome but that's not the same as running a full desktop environment.

i dont need a full desktop i need a modern browser and xterms running ssh to vps. netbsd apparently cant handle that out of the box. what does lua have to do with my described sys admin set up? why is it openbsd can ssh to a remote system and not corrupt the terminal but netbsd can't? why is it on amd64 in 2026 netbsd sees bkspace as ^H? who is the anachronism benefiting? why is it an app can crash x in netbsd but essentially never happens in my experience in openbsd? why are commands failing with no error? why do you need a search engine and a second machine or device to find the PKG_PATH to add binary packages on a new install?

your whole post definitely does not come across as 'reflections';

netbsd is more suitable for headless/server/embedded than desktop; now you know it first hand ;)

see what people call desktop for a sys admin in unix is the ability to run xterms and ssh without having to remap keys on a standard pc kbd or get into arcane teminal configuration just to do admin tasks. I dont need a desktop (and dont have a desktop) I need working terminal. i figured out my issues but the point stands, xterm ssh from netbsd to debian should not corrupt a terminal or require debugging two dozen possible causes. Have normal defaults. on OpenBSD I never needed to touch terminal settings if I didnt want to same with linux. only netbsd is stuck in 1982 where it is question if bkspace is del or ^H.

Regarding su…

  su -

might yield better results.

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