I revisit this thread from time to time to remind myself again why I use and appreciate NetBSD when I get the urge to play around with different *nix operating systems - this time I wanted to share my own thoughts on this.
Thanks to everyone for participating in this thread, there's a lot of interesting discussions in here.
Firstly, I believe FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and OpenBSD are all respective great operating systems, and at the end of the day it's down to use case that will determine which one's best fit for you.
In my case, my personal computing is rather lightweight and I tend to gravitate towards minimalist solutions. The most power demanding thing I do is compiling the kernel, watching HD videos and play some games on a DS/GBA emulator. I also run a few static web servers and file servers.
I mostly use low-cost single-board ARM computers as my daily driver for my personal computing (occasionally using a 6 year old Optiplex 3020M for work).
With that, FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD is a no-go for me since my low-spec hardware won't e.g. be really benefiting from the more server and power-oriented design and implementations such as HAMMER and ZFS etc. I would just end up bloating my systems with features I don't need and don't benefit from.
My use case would fit great for both NetBSD and OpenBSD - the reason I prefer NetBSD is a matter of taste (apart from that ARM is a 1 tier, first-class citizen in NetBSD)
Here's a small list of why I appreciate NetBSD:
- Simplicity
- Lightweight
- Hackable (as in tinkering, tweaking and tuning)
- Focus on clean code
- Security
- pkgsrc
- Bozotic-httpd and NPF
- Good performance on low-spec hardware
- Runs on all of my devices
- Friendly community
- etc..