NetBSD and my life (2005)

8/22/2026 at 11:50:21 PM

For me, it was Gentoo. I was a little bit lost after a bad time in the public school system, and not sure what to do with my life after that. I was fascinated by Linux, but never really got the hang of it. Used SuSE, which was fine, but I never really knew what I was doing. And then I get into Gentoo. Messed up some stage3 installs until it all started to click for me and I had the correct mental models for stuff and how it all fit together to form a complete system. That basically kickstarted my career as a Sysadmin, and I'm still a Gentoo user to this day (but only on the desktop, too much compiling for my laptop...). I feel very, very grateful to all the folks involved. Of course to all the people behind Linux, but Gentoo especially. In a way, it saved my live. Not sure where I would have landed w/o Linux.

I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.

by avhception

8/24/2026 at 2:07:42 AM

For me it was both.

And it tought me to 'rice' NetBSD like Gentoo, being spoiled by its use-flags. Didn't translate 1 to 1 OFC, but was very noticable.

Also noticable were the many bugs you ran into on the way.

But...

No risk? No Fun!

No pain? No gain!

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 4:55:38 AM

What were you risking if you were just a hobbyist? Sincere question.

by jambalaya8

8/24/2026 at 5:53:09 AM

Uh, much wasted time for one? Be it due to destroyed filesystems because of ugly hard crashes,

because the optimizations I applied during compiling without really understanding them(at that time) gave me many, many surprises, or the potential of destroyed hardware?

Yes, you could overdrive your screens into magic blue smoke.

Or speaking wrong to some interface-card, say SCSI, or ATA-CDROM.

All of that could happen. I only suffered from destroyed filesystems, though.

Phew!

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 3:10:06 PM

It isn't wasted time if you learn something, though, is it? To be fair, as a hobbyist I only ever really experimented as far as I could afford if the hardware broke, and anything too experimental I kept the only version of any data off of (that used to be way pricier in time and materiels though, true).

by jambalaya8

8/24/2026 at 4:28:19 PM

The learning could have been more straight forward with better guidance, maybe less weed too ;->

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/22/2026 at 9:19:57 PM

NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.

No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.

by cavem0nkey

8/22/2026 at 9:25:59 PM

I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.

by jambalaya8

8/22/2026 at 9:32:00 PM

I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :)

I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.

by cavem0nkey

8/22/2026 at 10:29:49 PM

Yeah, NetBSD definitely had Sparc compatibility. I wonder how many OpenSolaris and NetBSD machines on old Sparc hardware are still on the internet (like ones that aren't doing it just to say they are).

The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.

by jambalaya8

8/23/2026 at 3:38:43 PM

The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.

by hylaride

8/24/2026 at 2:38:46 AM

> With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons.

Not true. There were many lesser known Distros like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE which survived to this day.

I'd say the latter is running on more diverse hardware platforms than NetBSD, and actively developed and maintained :-)

Portable means just that: "Potentially portable if someone makes the effort."

Which NetBSD didn't in comparison.

And even if, it's lacking drivers for being fully featured.

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 4:54:26 AM

I mean there was always Minix! Minix was available on floppies long before most people started running linux. Because it existed several years before linux. There was also SCO Unix.

by jambalaya8

8/24/2026 at 5:43:13 AM

But you couldn't do shit with it, on most hardware. And it wasn't really free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) would have been more practical.

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 3:21:16 PM

I mean, why not BeOS, GNU Hurd, or ... etc. There wasn't much software for any of those things (and you would have had to be a pretty exotic sort of software pirate or know some hobbyists or be in an academic setting to afford them if you could not). That said I don't really support open source OSes for stuff like the stock market, and did not in the 1990s before they all shifted from AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and non-UNIX-based OSes to Linux in the late 90s/just before 9/11. Throwing this out there because we talked about how things can go wrong.

If you had any of the less common things like your mention or mine though, it was pretty good for job hunting. FWIW, never heard of your suggestion (more surprised I hadn't). But a lot of things were word of mouth back then, if not Computerworld, or something like it. I personally liked QNX a sh-t ton.

by jambalaya8

8/24/2026 at 4:07:49 PM

Huh! I had to work with AIX and some AS400, HP-UX, SunOS/early Solaris, but mostly SINIX. Also held a Microsoft MCSE for WinNT 4 and IIS once. I abandoned Windows for personal use by about 1994, gotten fed-up/snapped because of the unreliability of finding network peers during private LAN-parties. While that instantly worked with some Linux booted from ONE 1.44MB floppy disk! OFC no gaming possible with that. But that made me SNAP!

The last time I touched Windows in a professional setting was about 2001. Yay! Finally! Good Riddance!

Later on I had (by then obsolete) Sparc stations, and smaller pizza-boxes with PA-RISC 7500, or something. And many X86s. I abused my large kitchen as 'Cyberkitchen', having arranged all the systems in one corner, along two empty walls in a right angle, sometimes even shaped like an U. When I came home while it was dark, before switching the lights on it looked like something out of Sci-Fi, with all the status LEDs glowing in different colors :-)

But I didn't have any of that stuff in my living or sleeping room. I've found 'couch surfing' to be uncomfortable/unergonomic, even with early laptops. Always a good office chair, and big, non-wobbly/vibrating desks at the right height, even if somehow improvised.

Didn't do much with QNX, because I only had the demo version. While very impressive, it seemed impractical for my use-cases. Similar for BeOS.

At the moment I feel really comfortable with CachyOS running Plasma/KDE, minus all the gaming stuff, which I'm not interested in.

Absolutely hassle-free since about 2 years, doing everything I need without any lag, in most wacky configuration like ZRAM over all the 32GB physical RAM, on BTRFS.

Plus profile-sync-deamon for holding the browser profile in RAM, too.

And syncing it back periodically to 'disk', err...SSD, making even good old Firefox(or a derivative like LibreFox) fly.

Oh, and working suspend/resume every single time. AHARR HARR HARR!1!!

I preferred Byte, UnixWorld, c't, and iX to Computerworld.

Edit: Since you've mentioned GNU/Hurd/QNX/BeOS, ever heard of https://chimera-linux.org ?

Or https://genode.org ? I find the latter to be a most interesting alternative to things like QNX/BeOS/Haiku. Especially since it has a native port of current QT. But I have been too lazy and spoiled by CachyOS to invest much time into it. Though it does boot into live mode from USB-Keychain on my hardware. Hrrrm. Decisions, decisions...

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 11:25:02 PM

Seen and heard of chimera but only witnessed other people running it. It's a little too arcane for my tastes.

Pity you abandoned Windows before even winsock/trumpet came out.

by jambalaya8

8/25/2026 at 2:28:28 AM

94 may have been a typo/misremember. I remember for certain that the LAN-partying happened either on DOS via IPX or on Windows95 over NetBios, and it was the latter that enraged me. Which later on could be remedied by installing/activating the MS IP-stack, and using fixed IPs. No more endless waiting then. Even if the games themselves didn't use IP. It was just that the fixed IPs also made the other stuff synchronize in an instant, be it NetBios, or IPX(which didn't have that problem as much, or at all IIRC. But still, any relevant protocol installed, and Bam! Game on!). I also remember Trumpet/Winsock from even later, by using it to bring some older legacy systems into the network for some businesses, and thought of it as impressive for what it was, and what it ran on. But as I said, 'legacy' by then. I had no use for it before that, because almost nobody had internet at the time in that place. Compuserve and AOL via dial-in existed, though. But that was something else. I also fiddled with something based on KA9Q for the legacy stuff, which I've found to be more impressive, because leaner and meaner. And could show off my superior 'memmaker' powers, meaning I didn't have to rely on that thing to get the most free DOS RAM, by loading it high into UMB, EMS, XMS, whatever. That I don't remember exactly anymore.

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/24/2026 at 2:26:18 AM

I percieved FBSD as slower at the times, more bloated so to speak ;->

OTOH it gave a very usable console at 132x60 on a 21" CRT, which NetBSD didn't at the time, at least not on X86. Its ports tree was also more comprehensive.

Imagine Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M on that. Which were perfectly usable then!1!!

What else? Lemme think... the slow rebuild to MP from 4.4 to 5 made me abandon it.

By that time I've mastered NetBSD and gave a shit about the 132x60 textmode, because X with FVWM gave me so much more virtual desktop. It also used the 1.5GB Virtual Channel Memory SDRAM without having to do anything special, like under Linux, or FBSD, which somehow ran unstable with it.

by LargoLasskhyfv

8/22/2026 at 9:17:58 PM

NetBSD is the only Unix that IMO still fun to hack on.. no AI, just hack..

by pelasaco

8/23/2026 at 9:37:14 PM

its also an incredibly large codebase compared to the other bsds

by sitzkrieg

8/22/2026 at 8:19:07 PM

I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.

by tolerance

8/22/2026 at 10:19:18 PM

You could just throw a squirrel carcass in a cardboard box and install netbsd on it

by Grimeton

8/23/2026 at 1:12:10 AM

Even little-endian squirrels.

by zulux

8/24/2026 at 3:14:46 PM

1 little,

2 little,

3 little-endian squirrels

hums a tune

by esseph

8/22/2026 at 8:30:22 PM

I have been wanting to do this for a while. I have used FreeBSD and OpenBSD in server or embedded environments, but never as a desktop. And I have zero experience with NetBSD or DragonflyBSD but want to play with those too.

by whalesalad

8/23/2026 at 3:50:13 AM

It's easy as balls these days to spin up a VM with the OS of your choice provided it's not terribly taxing (which NetBSD isn't). Go ahead and just try it, man! Take an evening or a weekend.

by bitwize

8/22/2026 at 9:08:05 PM

I enjoyed the time I spent browsing the web and reading ebooks while running OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. The same goes for hosting a web page on a VPS I used to rent. I found that what people say about it is true: the documentation is great. To the extent that I needed to tinker I gained a fair amount of coherence about how things worked. This is sort of what I want the guys in my community to experience for themselves.

by tolerance

8/22/2026 at 8:15:52 PM

Awesome!

Two things:

1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?

Glad you got the spend more time with the family!

by eahm

8/22/2026 at 8:36:49 PM

As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/

by clort

8/22/2026 at 10:23:44 PM

freebsd = utility: performance, gnu software compatibility, drivers, closest thing to useful as a desktop (still not very), but almost x86 only

openbsd = security: internet exposed services

netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.

by Brian_K_White

8/23/2026 at 1:19:46 AM

NetBSD runs beautifully (but not quickly) on a 32-bit Raspberry Pi Zero. I hosted a mail server on that platform for about 7 years. I absolutely love how spare the system is when you start it up. You don’t even get a fancy shell, just sh. Running top on a new system is hilarious. It’s like init, your shell, and something else.

by raddan

8/23/2026 at 3:48:36 AM

Linux was not quite that spare, but pretty spare when I first started using it (1995). I liked watching the text crawl while the kernel brought itself, init, and a few daemons up; and having to type "startx" to even get into a graphical environment (and even that was just fvwm).

It was... cyberpunk. I can't think of any other way to describe the aesthetic, the feel, of early Linux. All these bits and bobs written by many hands yet somehow working together, none of them beholden to how some corporate overlord felt I should be using my computer. I became aware of the suck of proprietary software even in 1995.

NetBSD is a lot like this, still even today. I love working with/in/on it.

by bitwize

8/23/2026 at 2:55:19 PM

I used to have about 7 things running on my old laptop running vectorlinux. 600Mhz, 64 MB, 7GB.

by exe34

8/23/2026 at 3:44:59 AM

The sloppotrons are getting confused about old hardware support in the Linux kernel, so the kernel maintainers are simply removing it. NetBSD's portability is at significantly lower risk of being compromised like this, not least because the project bans sloppotrons outright. We may yet see a resurgence of NetBSD as "the OS for your toaster".

by bitwize

8/23/2026 at 11:44:54 AM

[dead]

by inkyoto

8/23/2026 at 2:40:51 PM

> 1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

He might be from around London

by n4r9

8/22/2026 at 10:31:56 PM

Or gentoo. Gentoo was pretty good around then, great to hack around with.

by jambalaya8

8/22/2026 at 8:09:39 PM

> This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)

I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.

by leecommamichael

8/23/2026 at 2:14:00 AM

You might enjoy this one: https://xkcd.com/541

by gurjeet

8/23/2026 at 3:03:36 PM

How could there even be an xkcd which is so applicable? Wow.

by leecommamichael

8/22/2026 at 8:35:48 PM

> NetBSD during peak hours, our httpd servers can deal with 35 requests per minute(internal and external).

even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.

by whalesalad

8/22/2026 at 9:10:50 PM

The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.

by kev009

8/22/2026 at 9:08:11 PM

> 12MB email attachments

It was a different time.

by alexpotato

8/23/2026 at 8:44:39 AM

I once worked for a company where the marketing department sent huge powerpoints presentations to each other via Lotus Notes. All people in the same office sitting next to each other. The Lotus mail server had no real issues with it, but i told them to stop abusing email as a file server and use the shared drive for that purpose. Took some time for them to getting used to, but the shared drive was so much faster for their purpose they quickly adopted to this ‘new way’ of working :)

by b3lvedere

8/23/2026 at 3:34:31 PM

I had an IT Helpdesk co-op term in the early 2000s that had the exact same problem of marketing emailing huge powerpoint presentations around...but we were on exchange (in the middle of migrating from NT, too!). Exchange...couldn't handle it very well. I couldn't even be that mad as PPT was (still is?) a terribly inefficient file format.

Same solution, though...

by hylaride

8/22/2026 at 11:24:12 PM

People forget easily, or simply were not around ;)

by sscaryterry

8/23/2026 at 4:22:36 PM

Why not just make sure you’re not on call for important events like your daughter’s birthday???

by zenethian

8/22/2026 at 10:50:06 PM

i've used FreeBSD, and sometimes NetBSD and OpenBSD after they were forked from the Jolitz's 386BSD release.

I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server operating systems.

My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance!

of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant 'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away), would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's... ...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf' the Linux penguin from behind...

Linux has also matured into an impressive OS. I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.

by elhosots

8/22/2026 at 10:08:25 PM

A fairytale is a beautiful thing.

by Grimeton

8/22/2026 at 8:34:11 PM

Cool stuff

by tech_army