My NetBSD (and first BSD) journey began in 2019, around the time COVID hit hard and we were all stuck in lockdown. I’d always wanted to dip my toes into the land of *BSD, having used Linux on and off for the past 10 to 15 years. I’d had a real love affair with Arch Linux during my university days, and, as with any good arc, it eventually peaked and I moved on.
So in 2019, with a lot of spare time and nowhere to go, I bought myself a second-hand ThinkPad X230 for the sole purpose of installing NetBSD. I’d been a long-standing member of the nixers.net community for years, and I always loved the look of a heavily customised, minimal Unix systems. One day I stumbled across a screenshot on r/unixporn by a user called @pin . He was using spectrwm, my beloved window manager from my Arch days. I messaged him on Reddit, told him I planned to try NetBSD, and he introduced me to UnitedBSD.com and, more importantly, his NetBSD installation guide.
I instantly signed up to the forum and started peppering him with questions, and he was incredibly obliging. He basically held my hand through my first two years of using NetBSD. We had private message threads going the whole time and exchanged thousands of messages. Not once did he tell me to “go read the man page” or dismiss a question as a waste of time. He always found time to help, and he always did it in a way that made me feel welcome, not like an outsider or a leech who was too lazy to learn. He saw me for what I was, someone enthusiastic about something he was passionate about, and he understood the barrier to entry could be steep. Instead of putting me in the too-hard basket, he took me under his wing. For that, I’ll always be grateful.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I’d been happily hacking away on my ThinkPad, refining my system, tweaking my configs, occasionally breaking things but learning from it (usually with Pin’s help). I only reinstalled a handful of times before the system became rock-solid. I enjoyed perfecting this setup for about five years. I eventually settled on sdorfehs as my main window manager, since the X230’s trackpad wasn’t great and a fully keyboard-driven workflow suited the machine perfectly.
Eventually, that ThinkPad arc reached its end. I was lucky enough to find a free PC on the curb (really). It just needed a new motherboard, and after gathering a few peripherals and a monitor, it became my new NetBSD desktop. With a proper desk setup and a dedicated mouse and keyboard, I could finally experiment with more mouse-driven workflows. After picking up a mate’s old graphics card, I was also able to start gaming again. I installed a new 2 TB NVMe drive and put Windows on it purely for gaming, but during that first year, I still lived in NetBSD about 80 percent of the time.
I probably spent 12 to 18 months experimenting with layouts until I landed on lxqt and openbox as my desktop environment. No surprise, the inspiration came from one of Pin’s earlier screenshots, and I knew he’d be able to answer any questions I had. That was about a year ago now, and my last screenshot is exactly how my system still looks today. I haven’t touched the configuration since.
Beyond the visual and workflow tinkering, I also spent a lot of time experimenting with POSIX shell scripting. @rvp was an amazing tutor and guided me through many of the obscure things I was trying to create or modify. He also helped me troubleshoot my system more than once and saved me from reinstalling several times. Thanks, rvp.
Earlier this year, I decided to ditch Windows for good and installed Fedora over that partition. Gaming on Linux has come a long way, and most of the games I enjoy run well enough. Another Windows drive is probably inevitable one day, but for now I'm content.
With my NetBSD system being basically complete, and Fedora scratching my *nix itch, I found myself booting into NetBSD less and less. My needs had changed. I no longer felt the urge to tinker endlessly. I’d already learned so much, and that energy shifted to other projects like my home media server. I wish I could say it runs *BSD, but I chose Debian for simplicity, and most of my services run in Docker. Realistically, almost every Docker guide assumes Debian.
So I used NetBSD less, and lived in Linux more. I still love the purity of BSD systems and wish I could daily-drive one forever, but the reality is that my needs have evolved and Linux currently serves them better.
I’ve decided to image my 500 GB NetBSD disk and archive the configs so I can always return to the system if the itch strikes again. I’ll be using the drive to store my Fedora Btrfs snapshots from now on, which feels like a fitting use.
I could reinstall NetBSD on the ThinkPad again, but at the moment I’m playing with Genode’s SculptOS, which is a real brain-buster and absolutely my kind of fun. I’m sure I’ll be back on BSD eventually, likely in the server space. Once I learn more about self-hosting on BSD, I can easily see myself switching my homelab from Debian to *BSD.
After reading @oui 's recent blog post about stepping back from NetBSD after years of dedication, it struck me how much our arcs overlapped. While we have very different needs from our operating systems, It reminded me that it’s okay to evolve and that loving an OS doesn’t mean chaining yourself to it forever. The philosophy, the lessons, the mindset, all of that remains after the reboot.
