An unexpected contender: NetBSD

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IMHO, the current state of NetBSD now is very similar to FreeBSD 9. It has working ZFS support but not yet able to do root on ZFS. It has two hypervisors: HAXM (via qemu-haxm) and NVMM (via qemu-nvmm). Within a few releases, I think it could catch up with FreeBSD.

NetBSD now is not just for toasters!
 
of course, but not feels the same
that FreeBSD
And this is not "this is better,this is worst that..."
no,the two systems are good
is useless put it in "Netbsd will cacht up FreeBSD sometime"
 
some very simpel thing like ipv6 is problematic with netbsd.
There are hardware drivers for weird and old hardware, nothing more i think.
 
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I tried NetBSD about 2 years ago, it may have been a 7 release series.

The desktop of NetBSD was in very low resolution. If this could be fixed, I didn't know how to. Only 1 application could use the sound card at a time. FreeBSD had this setback maybe over 10 years ago, but they said it was at the application layer, not at the sound architecture level.

NetBSD has less ports as well. But it was sturdy, and their ports system seemed less complicated. Their dependency options weren't from an ncurses menu: they were set from a file. Their dependencies may not necessarily have been simpler, but they seemed so.
 
sysctl said:
IMHO, the current state of NetBSD now is very similar to FreeBSD 9. It has working ZFS support but not yet able to do root on ZFS. It has two hypervisors: HAXM (via qemu-haxm) and NVMM (via qemu-nvmm). Within a few releases, I think it could catch up with FreeBSD.

NetBSD now is not just for toasters!
Click to expand...

I'm confused. Am I reading threads started from forum member gh_origin or sysctl? One account stopped posting and the other started.
 
Since this thread is going down the toilet very soon, I'm going to share my technical observations about NetBSD.
NetBSD is pretty much like my grandfather basement. You could find everything down there and at the same time nothing. Goat bless his Sol La Si.
 
sidetone said:
I tried NetBSD about 2 years ago, it may have been a 7 release series.

The desktop of NetBSD was in very low resolution. If this could be fixed, I didn't know how to. Only 1 application could use the soundcard at a time. FreeBSD had this setback maybe over 10 years ago, but they said it was at the application layer, not at the sound architecture level.

NetBSD has less ports as well. But it was sturdy, and their ports system seemed less complicated. Their dependency options weren't from an ncurses menu: they were set from a file. Their dependencies may not necessarily have been simpler, but they seemed so.
Click to expand...
The current NetBSD 9 is a real changer. You should try it. I surprised with it too, it completely changed from previous NetBSD versions. It's an exciting release with many new improvements and innovations. Yeah, I started with NetBSD 7, too. Found it's not usable on my hardware, gave up, try NetBSD 8, it's better but still not usable, but NetBSD 9 worked very well on my hardware.

NetBSD 9 has i915kms driver in a usable form that I could play 4K video on youtube and play my favorite game supertux, too. It's a bit lagging compared to FreeBSD. And it use my native resolution, too. IMHO, the current state of it is better than the i915kms shipped with FreeBSD 11.4 by default but lose to the i915kms installed from drm-kmod.

The sound quality is very good now. It still can't comparable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD but it just works.

NetBSD now using pkgin as the package manager. I found it's much better than their old pkg_* commands. OpenBSD's pkg_* commands is a joke compared to pkgin. pkgin is both powerful and easier to use, comparable to Linux's apt.

But the real thing I want to mention is NetBSD 9's new hypervisors: HAXM (via qemu-haxm) and NVMM (via qemu-nvmm). They are real contenters to FreeBSD's Bhyve!
 
drhowarddrfine said:
And your point is what? Note that technical discussion of other operating systems is not allowed here.
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It's not technical. I only want to inform people here about the rising of an unexpected contender, NetBSD. Given how people here underestimate NetBSD, I think I should do so.
 
wolffnx said:
of course, but not feels the same
that FreeBSD
And this is not "this is better,this is worst that..."
no,the two systems are good
is useless put it in "Netbsd will cacht up FreeBSD sometime"
Click to expand...
"Catch up" is "in the same state of usable, in both features and ease of use" in this narrow context. I didn't measure the performance of NetBSD compared to FreeBSD so I didn't put it in the definition. But it should be there to be a complete definition of "catch up". So "nearly catch up" could be a more correct phrase.
 
sysctl said:
an unexpected contender, NetBSD
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Contender for what?

If you want to use NetBSD, no-one on this forum is stopping you from doing so. If you think it's better than FreeBSD, great. Your post about OpenBSD was much the same - it's better at some things, not so good at others, and does some things differently.

Is there some sort of race or competition?

Use whatever operating system you want and works for you. We don't need to know about it. What next, a review of breakfast cereals to let us know which ones you find crunchiest?

An unexpected contender: Kellogg's Frosties

There's no one perfect operating system that's "best" for every use any more than there's a "best" breakfast cereal.
 
20-100-2fe said:
I think the main reason to choose a BSD flavor rather than another is the values of its community.
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What are the "values" of the FreeBSD "community"?

What are the "values" of the "communities" of OpenBSD or NetBSD or DragonflyBSD or Linux or Windows or MacOS or Android or iOS or Kellogg's Frostie consumers? Or Toyota Corolla drivers? Most of those things are a bunch of different people using something in common.

YMMV but my experience is that there are lots of nice people trying to get along and be helpful in all those "communities" but plenty of jerks and trolls as well. And the internet magnifies some voices x5 (and social media x50!)

Find what works for you - and that might be a combination of operating systems depending on the tasks you need to handle, or a mix of breakfast cereals. Your choices aren't necessarily any better than mine, but hey, that's OK. You want/need to do different things to me. I don't need to convert you and you don't need to convert me. We're all winners!

I don't understand people who get so fired up about operating systems especially free/open-source ones. You don't like it - great, go find another one. No-one is holding a pistol to your head forcing you to use MegaBSD. MegaBSD happens to work for me and these other folk, it doesn't work for you. That's OK.

I like seeing what the other BSDs and Linux distributions are up to so I go and read sites that cover all that sort of stuff.

Anyway, cough, these are the FreeBSD forums about FreeBSD stuff, so 🤐 from me.
 
IMHO it's perfectly ok to have an eye on where other OS are going and what methods & tools they implement, especially the other BSDs. Interesting things can get ported over, this happens often & in a colaborative fashion.
  • the HAMMER filesystem of DragonflyBSD is very interesting (it is mentioned on a FreeBSD projects page),
  • the self-healing facilities of Solaris & MINIX3, or
  • the role-based access control (RBAC) of Solaris: no root login, root is a role & can be configured to require aproval of a configurable number of administrators for certain tasks, e.g. 2 out of 3; it's always clear who did what because it's logged (like sudo(8)'s log).
Thus I find it reasonable to discuss such topics in a FreeBSD forum.
 
20-100-2fe said:
Contender is definitely improper here. From what I see, there is much more cooperation than competition in the BSD world.
Click to expand...

I created the thread after watching WWE. I'm not an English speaker not I'm good at English. I encountered the word "contender" on the WWE show and found the word is cool so I just pick it up and use it. Please pardon me for my lack of English vocabulary, everyone. BTW, what is the correct word to use?
 
sysctl said:
BTW, what is the correct word to use?
Click to expand...

Using "contender", you have learned a few things you didn't know, so it was worth doing. ;)
Besides, your post didn't contain any idea of competition or rivalry, so you could just have chosen "NetBSD" as title and not changed anything else. :)
IMO, sharing new and opinions about related systems is always interesting - what's more when they belong to the same family.
I'm glad I have learned interesting things about DragonFly on this forum, for instance.
 
"NetBSD mini-review"?

I think any words that sound like there's some battle or conflict or race or competition or upmanship is going to set some people off (myself in this case!).

As the others have said - co-operation, learning from others (people and operating systems), and free information exchange.

For me that's one of the best things about open source - we can see something good in DragonflyBSD, or NetBSD, or OpenBSD, or Linux and try and do the same in FreeBSD (or vice versa.)

But just saying FreeBSD should copy all this cool stuff from MegaBSD (or whatever) isn't very helpful - there are a limited amount of developers (thank you!) working on FreeBSD and they can't do everything or match the resources behind Windows or Linux. (That's not happened in this thread, just a pet peeve!) But think that is the same in all walks of life - "the government should do X and Y and P and Q and R because the government of [some other country] is doing those things". Or replace "government" with "council" or "school" or "soccer club" or "knitting club". Only so many resources to go around.

I use OpenBSD and FreeBSD daily (and Linux, Mac OS X, and, yes, even Windows when I have to) - looked at NetBSD and DragonflyBSD but not much past doing an install - just because I install them and then stop and think what I need them for and don't have an answer. But maybe one day I'll be after the HAMMER file-system or an OS that will run on a toaster, and I'll know where to look.
 
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