NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.
The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:
“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”
It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions.
I’ve never tried NetBSD myself, the only BSD I’ve tried was TrueNAS, which I ended up replacing with Debian based OpenMediaVault, as that was juat easier for me to figure out. But one of the anti-AI devs I follow on Wafrn is a NetBSD evangeliat, and told me you can get XFCE4 or MATE working using Xorg on it, which could easily cover what I would be comfortable with as a desktop environment. The big issues seems to be things like connectivity and peripheral support for some hardware, but the dev I follow was able to get most of this stuff working for them in this. Anyway - I am very glad this project exists, even if I am sticking with Debian 13 and MacOS 15 for my current needs.
I decided to try NetBSD after reading this post and comments
you love to see it :3
I remember trying it in 1994. But I only booted my Amiga 3000 into NetBSD to play Hack. 🤪
That sounds coolio. Wasn’t there a port of Hack for AmigaOS anyway?
Bruh whats with the 120p pogging guy thumbnail?
Has anyone used a *BSD lately? Genuine question. I have tried one of them in the past and it wasn’t really something that you can use as a daily driver. Have they improved? If so, I wouldn’t mind taking another dive.
I actually tried NetBSD recently with everything default, and it was surprisingly usable. Comparing to my current installation of Void, I found it not so daily-driveable though, at least without learning bunch of new stuff.
I tried FreeBSD couple weeks ago. I was disappointed. Lots of good stuff but coming from Arch the documentation is… ugh. I tried installing it on my old, very common laptop that has run every Linux I’ve ever thrown at it. After a half hour of troubleshooting the WIFI I found a comment at the bottom of an old forum thread stating my wifi chipset which is very common is simply not supported. Then I installed it in a VM. Installing KDE was weird, the packages were simply not in the repos. Then again, at the bottom of a forum thread, I found someone explaining that KDE packages regularly disappear from the repos, that it’s “normal”. And yes, 3 days later, finally the KDE packages reappeared and I could install it.
Edit: just an example. I installed librewolf just now. This is what it says when you install it:
Everything’s always a problem. Death by 1000 paper cuts. It really feels like Linux from 15-20 years ago. I’ve been spoiled by modern Linux for too long. But again, there’s really awesome stuff. Jails, ports and the Linux compatibility layer are pretty awesome. Also there are utilities to make things easier. I installed KDE with desktop-installer for instance to make it easier.
Oooofff. I’d lose it coming from cachyOS. I’m kind of spoiled.
My router at home is a virtualized OPNsense machine, which is based on FreeBSD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems
There are dozens of us!
I do. I have an OpenBSD vps that provides the ingress and proxying for my selfhosted stuff, and vanilla FreeBSD running my NAS and a few self-hosted services. I have an old usff as a desktop for messing around that has bounced around operating systems including the above.
A laptop is the hardest use case for them, but doable if you dont mind it feeling like Linux a decade or more ago. I actually preferred Linux a decade ago, so its fine with me. Ill probably switch my personal thinkpad to one of them again when I have time.
A laptop is the hardest use case for them, but doable if you dont mind it feeling like Linux a decade or more ago
That’s what gets me. I used to like tinkering and fixing things 10 years ago when I first switched to Linux full-time, but not anymore. Now I’m one of those boring dudes who just wants their shit to work so I can get real stuff done. And Linux right now does just that for me. I hardly ever have issues with my Linux run PC. I really want BSD to get better. I like more options.
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Yeah, I daily drive a BSD, it’s definitely not for everyone. Software compatibility and some file system quirks are probably going to be the biggest hurdles. Oh well, maybe someday macOS will be able to compete with Linux.
:/ that’s actually pretty frustrating to hear for me. I really want them to get better so I can use it on a laptop.
Oh sorry, that was just a joke about macOS having BSD heritage. I don’t have experience with modern *BSDs
I gave it a try in a VM , because I do that kinda thing for fun.
I couldn’t figure out the DE install, but I really didn’t try nor do any research.
Compared to my experience with arch or fedora, it’s not something to half ass on a whim.
FreeBSD is actually quite easy when you know Arch from before the introduction of systemd. It also has a massive documentation.
Well, my experience with arch is sloppin’ it with archinstall :
Well damn then.
It was pretty easy for me to run KDE on freebsd following these steps. I’m running it in a VM, mostly just to become familiar with it, so there’s probably a lot I don’t have to fuss with.
It’s basically just install sddm and KDE then enable them in sysrc.
That really doesn’t look too bad. I might just spin up a VM and fuss with it for a bit
@[email protected] is probably right. Again, my expression isn’t “it’s impossible” it’s “you need to pay attention to achieve it”.
I just slop a random distro into a VM once in a while for the lulz. The only thing it indicates is “how idiot proof is installing this OS?”.
The result of the experiment is that FreeBSD is not idiot proof. I got it to install, but I didn’t get to install a DE (LXQT) from the bare bones install. I probably can , I just need to actually pay some attention and read some guides.
The other thing is that I’m installing it into an already weak machine, so putting fancier DEs like GNOME or KDE aren’t going to work out too good.
LXQT is “official” for FreeBSD
On OpenBSD, will probably shift to NetBSD in the near future.
Perfectly reliable for daily driving. I don’t really have any issues
You must be a genius or just have the patience of a mountain, or I may be too far behind with my knowledge about it. Man, I really don’t have the energy for tinkering, but I might mess with it on my laptop some time in the near future. Which BSD has the best hardware compatibility and is easy to install a desktop on? Because when I tried it back in 1776, it didn’t even recognize my Wi-Fi card.
I think I’m just a more tolerant of old tech? I have no use case for really modern high compute tasks and OpenBSD has everything I need. Kicad, Freecad, Krita, and a text editor.
I’m no expert but I’m under the impression that WiFi compatibility has been an issue because of a lack of available drivers. For a long time, some common broadcom and realtek chips required that the windows driver be used for Linux via a “wrapper”.
" Didn’t recognize my WiFi card" was a common problem.
Ah, this is giving me flashbacks to running Linux on a Sony Vaio in 2008
Wasn’t that because the hardware was shit? Making the cpu do most of the work?
Oh yeah, I’m not blaming BSD at all, I think it’s just these manufacturers don’t even think of BSD when they make a device. That same laptop was fine with Linux. So yeah, it’s not a BSD fault. No drivers and we can’t do anything about a manufacturer who refuses to support a certain os
I thought net occasionally lifted code from Linux or others especially for of drivers or graphics etc. If that is right I wonder how that will match this policy as AI code spreads elsewhere
Yeah.
They probably mean the base system.
Feels like a losing battle tbh.
Feels like a losing battle tbh.
These kinds of battles are already lost. People are going to use the AI to create programs, and it’s up to us to hope that they aren’t just slopping that shit out there instead of saving time and effort.
It’s FOSS (free, open source software). Through Package Managers and the most recent AUR incidents, we know that people don’t give a shit about the source code, and just want the code that makes us go.
Some people do read the source code and verify stuff. But beyond even the AI shit, people are just grabbing binaries from wherever and putting them into the machine to make it go.
I’m not saying I don’t do it, I’m saying that’s my behaviour too, but the AI isn’t the cause, it’s a symptom of how people behave.
Easiest path wins.
I tend to agree.
People ship generated without reading it first.
Sure, and people also ship without adequate testing too.
There’s a reason why Linux Torvalds can use the AI to make something run 30x faster, and mainstream businesses can’t change the colour of a button without breaking shit on live, then having to go back and run the ticket through again.
That’s also true.
They probably mean the base system.
That’s all they can control realistically, the entire rest of the stack is tainted now unfortunately.
Oh I know this. This is the OS that runs the mech suits in the matrix.
I suppose that diversity in… let’s be honest: Unix-y operating systems is a good thing, and I personally think that this should be the “center of gravity” or the more-or-less common ground as far as OS design goes.
Still, besides windows, I am quite dissatisfied that so much talent and brain power goes into pretty-much-redundant OSes.
I do wonder if we would be better off if Plan 9, Herd, maybe BeOS (haiku, I know) also received OSS coders’ attention and saw development into the modern age…
More diversity, more ways of thinking about how an OS could be built instead of 600 Linux distros, a dozen package managers, etc.
Rob Pike wrote this 26 years ago: “Linux is the hot new thing… but it’s just another Unix.”
There is no central institution which organizes or has authority to direct FOSS developers to do this or that. If you want something to be done, your best bet is to do it yourself.
I still remember NetBSD from the memes where it runs on ANYTHING.
“I just threw a dead squirrel into a shoe box and installed NetBSD on it”
But can it run in Doom?
I have no idea how these things are differentiated but I guess that means NetBSD does not use the Linux kernel but something else? Sorry for the naive question.
Correct. BSD is a separate family of operating systems. Like Linux, they are Unix-like but they use their own kernel(s). The original BSD is way older than Linux, I think from the 70s. These days, the most popular BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin (the lower layers of macOS, originally based on FreeBSD)
I’d just like to throw out that the BSDs including netbsd are unixes and not unix-like.
From the NetBSD Website:
NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.
I wonder why they would write that as they are a direct descendant of BSD, a Unix, making them a Unix and therefore not unix-like, but the real thing.
Unix is a licensing issue. Linux BSD or even Mac OS could likely get Unix certification. Mac OS technically had it even though it shouldn’t have for about a decade. However, none of them are Unix because none are currently paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. Or have made the niche compliances necessary.
That is like Khronos’s CTS for vulkan. It is still vulkan without it, just not necessarily compliant with the whole standard. Same applies top Unix. macOS 26 and older is certified and 27 probably is in the process of being done.
Yes and no. Kronos doesn’t really care as long as you’re compliant. The open group will come after you for licensing fees and take you to court. That’s the difference. Therefore, Linux and the BSDs are just Unix like and not actual Unix. It may only be a technicality, but it is a significant one.
Is Rogue not Rogue-like?!
It’s a roguelikelike. It’s like things that are like itself.
No. Rogue is Rogue, rogue-like is inspired by Rogue and tries to closely follow the concept of rogue.
So you make a category of games to download and you exclude Rogue from the rogue-likes because? Why can’t a thing be like itself?
Am I my father? Definitely not, but I still look a lot like him, have some of his mannerisms etc etc.
Also, I’m being pedantic right now for the sake of it haha.
In the end it doesn’t really matter that much ;)
It’s fun to think about!
thank you RedWeasel-like commenter
I came running with my axe at first. Thanks for making this comment. lol
I was going by Wikipedia which calls NetBSD „Unix-like“ but to be honest I have very little BSD experience.
The whole BSD family are THE unix.
No, THE Unix is the original AT&T Unix from 1969. BSD is a derivative of that from the late 70s.
I can agree with that, yes, but BSD was an extension and a modification of the AT&T bell labs Unix. So essentially the same.
And for the 30 years where Unix was a big thing, BSD was one of the big 2 “flavors” of Unix.
… A thing is not like itself?
The modern compound phrase “X like” implies that something is similar to another thing while NOT being the thing itself.
A rogue like game has characteristics similar to the 80’s video game titled Rogue. But is not the game Rogue. We don’t say Rogue is a rogue like. Rogue is just the game Rogue.
Just like you are not a Skullgrid like user, you are the Skullgrid.
If I said could you hand me that gold-like thing I point at would you actually think it was gold even if it was?
Yes, it has its own kernel, and it is included with a distribution of software with 29,000 packages (about the size of Debian IIRC). Many POSIX compatible programs and collections / desktops such as KDE will build on it, but it also has own versions of tools close to the system.
This is possible because a UNIX or Linux kernel is a strong abstraction of the hardware, and software designed for POSIX compatibility will run on most of it. There are also kernel-layer subsystems like the ZFS file system which will run on a number of different kernels.
Yes, you are right. The Berkeley Software Distribution is a free Unix operating system and associated software distribution, much like Linux. It uses a different, more permissive license. And the kernel is separate to Linux.
The two distributions share a lot of software these days, but the kernel is the defining difference. The Wikipedia page has the nitty gritty.
Love the “simplified evolution of Unix systems” diagram.
Interesting that it’s NetBSD on the receiving end of this, I thought it was effectively extinct compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD
Perhaps the other sets of maintainers signalled differently or something?
Glad to see it of course, just curious
Edit: read again that they’ve explicitly said NetBSD is AI-free
thriving
