If you ever find yourself interested in living in a NetBSD system, check out the SDF: sdf.org

the SuperDimensionalFortress has been around since the 80s and is now one of the largest installations of NetBSD in the US/world. Membership gets you such perks as: email address, a private (invite-only) Mastodon instance, a hosted Matrix instance, and more.

While you aren't an administrator on the SDF instance, you can definitely get a sense of what it's like. Different membership tiers get you access to different tools: Free users don't get IRC outbound, MetaARPA members are granted access to the big disk store and hosted websites and even development tools.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 10.0, the eighteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

It represents cumulative improvements to the operating system since NetBSD 9.x was originally branched in 2019.

Hooray! I've been running successive release candidates in a VM for a couple of weeks now, just upgraded to 10.0-RC6 this week. Guess I'll do another upgrade soon.

The Amiga port got significant improvements, including many not listed in the release notes.

Xorg works much better now, first boot is significantly faster, and tools used for writing the installer image into disk can safely work with partitions extending above 4GB or over 4GB size.

I still use netbsd as my main desktop, since more than 15 years and counting.

Long live NetBSD.

My system uptime is counted in years.

I've never used NetBSD, but this announcement is rekindling my desire to install it on my old PowerBook G4.

Yea babyyyy I've been waiting for this release. I've been eager to fire it up on my Thinkpad.

Awesome news!

I've been running a few versions of the RCs for NetBSD 10 on a Pine RockPro64. A few reasons NetBSD 10 is a good choice for this Aarch64 device:

- Handles ARM's big.LITTLE well. You can use /usr/sbin/schedctl -A 4,5 to pin a process to the fast cores.

- Generally rock solid -- I've had uptimes in months and generally only rebooted when I upgraded. Like today!

- Can boot from an eMMC instead of an SD card.

- Supports the PCIe card. I have an SSD adapter. You can even use ZFS.

- HDMI support.

I've been interested to try out (Net|Open|Free)BSD for a while. I mostly code and compile C code. What should one expect when going from Linux to either of these BSD systems?

Good to know, will install the latest release. I mainly use lubuntu because of better browser support and driver support (I'm cheap and buy cheap laptops which have unsupported hardware). This could be overcome if I got off my ass and started to code in ANSI C89. Still need to finish my OpenStep ICHX IDE Driver. Congrats to the team :)

> Apple M1 SoC support, e.g. the M1 Mac Mini.

AsahiBSD soon?

Congrats on the eighteens major release.

congratulations, the RCs were quite stable so it should work well for all!

I hope the NetBSD devs included the latest version 5.6.1 of "xz" as it has some new interesting features.

I am really quite heavily involved in the tech sector, across a lot of domains. I don’t know a soul who runs a BSD variant. How can I expose myself to this arena beyond making a BSD box… which seems like a waste of time at the moment.

From a userspace/user perspective, honestly not that much will be different.

The package management is different from apt/rpm but there are plenty of distros with pkgsrc type systems.

Most FOSS software is available and provided, for some Linux only stuff there is linux emulation.

Less support for drivers and new features.

Really IMO it comes down to kernel features and development, and given Linux kernel security attitudes *BSD can be pretty tempting sometimes.

If you want something with GUI out of the box, consider GhostBSD. IMHO OpenBSD also has an advantage when being used as a laptop or desktop because its developers seem more inclined to daily drive it than free/net.

It's true that drivers might require a bit of fiddling, but if your hardware has been around for a while you'll probably manage.

I'm quite fond of OpenBSD. It's such a nice, wholesome Unix experience. The man-files are great, typically you can get by on those if you mess up and lose Internet connection. To me it has a feeling of being rock solid, like it'll never break. Common programs differ a bit, pkg_add rather than apt/RPM/pacman/&c., you'll probably use pf rather than ufw or iptables, vmm/vmd rather than Docker/jails, flags on some everyday terminal tooling work differently.

Some software just isn't available due to it being considered insecure by the OpenBSD community or its 'dictator for life'. As a C developer you might run into such constraints.

A readable top output.

Poor driver support, poor performance, lots of manual editing of config files to accomplish routine tasks, but BSD is "more cohesive" according to most of its proponents.

Try one in a VM first. Get used to the different pkg management in whichever BSD you use vs. the linux distro you're used to using. NetBSD uses pkgsrc, which is pretty straightforward to use.

No systemD.

If you're using it as a desktop, it will take a little more time to config things to fit what you need. More command line editing of config files, than say Linux Mint or similar linux distros.

FreeBSD has the biggest community so it's easier to get help online.

That being said, NetBSD is worth checking out, especially for your use case.

If you decide to try it out on hardware, check out https://bsd-hardware.info/ and see if your machine is supported.

Also check out UnitedBSD.com It's a forum and there are many NetBSD users there.

Expect to configure your drivers manually and poor support for sleep on more recent devices. Otherwise, it’s pretty great!

Can't use docker ecosystem.

Joy.

Arguably, macOS is a BSD variant. Much of the userspace UNIX utilities and a lot of the networking stack were forked from FreeBSD. Although it's not the nicest showing, because Apple doesn't pull updates very frequently; a two decade old TCP stack has a lot of issues, Apple added MPTCP and nice PMTUD, but doesn't have SYN cookies, so I wouldn't run a public server with it.

Maybe you can find a BSD shell account somewhere? But otherwise, yeah, you need to run a BSD to experience it. How woulr you experience Linux without a Linux machine? There's live cds and virtual machine images and what nots for BSDs too.

I can't say if its worth your time or not. Not a lot of companies run production on FreeBSD anymore, unfortunately. Yahoo was midway through switching when I left, WhatsApp was almost done when I left. I'm happier running FreeBSD on my personal equipment than I was with Debian, but that makes it worthwhile for me, not you. Switching OSes is a long process and living in multiple OSes at the same time isn't easy. I use Linux for work, so I have to go back and forth between ifconfig on my home boxes and production Linux, but ip addr on my dev box. And sometimes netstat and sometimes ss, etc. It'd be nicer if everything was consistent and didn't change for what seems like the sake of change, but it is what it is.

Try something that’s unique to one BSD or another. For example, NetBSD supports Lua for kernel scripting[1] and Veriexec[2] for checking the integrity of executables.

[1] https://man.netbsd.org/luactl.8

[2] http://netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-veriexec.html

For FreeBSD, search for Netflix Open Connect appliance. Also, follow @cperciva

For OpenBSD, build a router+firewall for your home.

For FreeBSD jails networking here is a post for a two server infra https://blog.uirig.com/freebsd-jails-network-setup

Why do you consider it a waste of time?

> I am really quite heavily involved in the tech sector, across a lot of domains. I don’t know a soul who runs a BSD variant.

Really? Wow. I know quite a few. Perhaps your experience isn't as broad as you think.

> How can I expose myself to this arena beyond making a BSD box…

You can't. Make a BSD box.

> which seems like a waste of time at the moment.

That is an exceptionally foolish comment, which others have pointed out, and you deserve it, I'm afraid.

Maybe try it in a VM, or use second hand thinkpads or similar supported hardware.

So you would only "expose yourself", specially a quite low friction action of trying a new piece of software, if you know someone who already "wasted their time" on it? Do you use the same criteria with every piece of software? What's your point?

Why not play with one in a VM?