NetBSD users, why do you use it over FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

Greemngreek

What's your NetBSD story?

Honestly,...
I was/am a Void (musl libC) user. Void was created by a former NetBSD dev. and I really like the way Void handles quite a few things, so you could say I was curious.
I really dislike the increasing influence of Microsoft on the Linux foundation, that made me look for alternative OSs.
Fast forward this a bit before it becomes boring, I ended-up picking NetBSD. Why? Why not?
I've always felt attracted to smaller projects, so Free was out, kind-of. As much as I'm concerned about security, I still want to use my computer (hyperthreading), so Open was not the top choice. I'm still curious about DragonFly, but I ended-up choosing Net and I'm happy with it. I really like the simplicity and the features it has been getting.
Pick your poison 😉

Jay

My story here https://runbsd.info/people/jaypatelani.html
Currently on NetBSD/OS108 🙂

Greemngreek

Jay Great one!
Also, you're u/jaypatelani right? At last a *BSD user from India...

Jay

Greemngreek yes 🙂

JuvenalUrbino

pin I've always felt attracted to smaller projects,

yeah, me too, for several reasons, among the others:

they're usually underestimated and undeservedly played down
they tend to attract the sort of people capable of thinking out of the box, who do not blindly follow trends, and, at the same time, those moved only by sincere passion, rather than a political stance, hype or economic return ....
they can often boast some unique, unconventional, attracting, non-mainstream ideas which are a true joy to play with for a nerd like me.

pin I still want to use my computer (hyperthreading), so Open was not the top choice

Realistically speaking, for the limited use case of a medium-end desktop or a low-end home server, SMT doesn't affect performance in a significantly noticeable manner, and it can be re-enabled at any time on OpenBSD either way. For the record, I have smtoff=YES in /etc/rc.conf on my NetBSD servers. I may not be the most suited and definitely not the most competent person to tell this, but I think the problem with performance on OpenBSD are rather the giant kernel-lock (malloc() allowing no more than one thread in the allocator at a time), the outdated 4.4BSD scheduler, their poor SMP implementation, the overall 'hardening, sandboxing, resource limits, memory protection, encryption, randomization, privilege-escalation prevention, exploit mitigations, stripped-down codebase...' approach designed to enhance security even at the expense of performance and features, the perl-based packaging system, the lack of TRIM and tmpfs support, their sole virtualization suite being limited to 1 CPU, soft-updates being disabled by default, their general total absence of interest in anything related to performance, including the TCP/IP stack; and to this you can finally add no default hyperthreading.
So yes, all the times I tried OpenBSD in the past, it always felt a bit slower than anything else. Sometimes it's more noticeable, sometimes it's not, depending on your hardware (the more powerful the hardware, the more evident the gap), the architecture, your setup and your actual use case (avarage load, concurrent tasks, network traffic and what else).
Yet, AFAIK SMP on OpenBSD got great improvements starting with 6.0, and as I was reading the 6.6 release notes the other day, I noticed they're unlocking a lot of stuff; they also introduced Vulkan support, which is great....thereby chances are high I'd end up surprised by OpenBSD's performance if I tested OpenBSD again on a spare machine.
Another problem with Open, is some apps randomly segfaulting at runtime due to the restraints of which above, but this a problem of 3rd-party bad software design (and should be a concern for the respective developers), not OpenBSD's fault...yet, it can result troublesome (@pin your case with xchemtool on NetBSD is a good comparable example).

Anyway, we're not here to talk about Open, but why one would opt for NetBSD, so here's my main reasons:

simplicity: pure retro UNIX feel, most things done by editing conf files
lightweight; no doubt here, Net is really the king of lightweight, runs on '80s CPUs with a bunch of MBs of RAM
portability, serious effort continously made to keep everything cleanly split into 'Machine Dependent' (MD) and 'Machine Independent' (MI) areas; think we don' t need further argumentations here. I'm particularly referring to real support for SPARC, ARMv-8, m68k, SGImips, MIPS evaluation boards, macPPC, DEC Alpha, Amiga, NeXT, Sony NEWS, Dreamcast
same simple and fast packaging system on all platforms (NetBSD, Linux, macOS and Illumos) and archs, with a well-optimized and easy to deploy toolchain, high-level cross-compilation capabilities, ease at packaging and good likelihood of getting stuff packaged in case you need at and ask.
outstanding ABI
modularity (rump kernels, installation split in independent sets, modular X)
virtualization: used to run a QuesOS-like Xen dom0 on Net, now I'm moving to NVMM; then you have HAXM, alongside NVMM, to use as desktop-oriented hybrid hypervisor by using QEMU as frontend in both cases; a reliable Linux compat layer with a good set of supported syscalls; decent wine support (FreeBSD's implementation is better, while it is not available on Open and DragonFly)
journaled (see WABPL) FFSv2 with snapshots and TRIM, CHFS for flash memory, LFS, ZFS for storage as of 9.0
nvidia support with nouveau(4)...crucial to me as practically everything I own is equipped with Nvidia discrete graphics
acceptable bluetooth support, the only BSD capable of making my bluetooth keyboard work
ARM: armv5/6/7, armv8 (aarch64)...Net generally is really ahead here in terms of hardware support, stability, maintenance, availability of binary packages, and this is a major concern of mine as tend to rely on cheap ARM boards for a home 'server'
NPF, the firewall I'm fond of most, but I may be biased, since it's the only I really know how to use, hence the only I feel confident using. I like its syntax, the 'procedures', the NAT routing system, it's being BPF-based and using BPFjit, its integration with blacklistd(8) and pcap-filter(7), its dynamic extendibility with Lua scripts.
good performance (doesn't keep up with Linux, Solaris or FreeBSD), with its more modern SMP, fine-grained lock, the Solaris-like M2 sched, the firewall optimized for performance and...
good security: kauth, several modern exploit mitigation in place (ASLR, KASLR, SMAP/SMEP, PaX Segvguard, PIEs), pkgsrc hardening with a fine tracking of vulnerabilities and patches promptly available on quarterly branches, not only the rolling current, a good encryption module (CGD) , the veriexec subsystem, the kleak suite to discover kernel memory leaks, NPF, blacklistd, sane defaults... even though it's still clearly behind OpenBSD
kernel built-in mixer, using audio(4) abstraction layer based on Solaris SunAudio, which undoes the very need for a userspace-level sound server (pulseaudio, jack, sndio, esound, nas) in standard desktop scenarios, something unheard on other Unices
many interesting features to experiment, play with, and implement in various setups, like rump kernels and Lua scriptability
welcoming and fun community capable of autocriticism, no fanboysm or elitism, good help support on mailing list, no strict RTFM
no NIH syndrome, nor obsession with removing GNU/GPLed code, and yet all native stuff (the large majority of base system) being BSD-2-CLAUSE licensed

JuvenalUrbino

The most noticeable problems with NetBSD (when compared to other BSDs) are the not really well-maintained and often lacking documentation, the steeper learning curve for beginners, the fact it lags a little behind in terms of wifi and acpi (suspend/resume, backlight..) support, the lack of userspace-level containerization system (FreeBSD has jails) excluding the alpha-state sailor, the eternal beta/testing-state affecting some features, the lack of a sandboxing suite (OpenBSD has pledge, FreeBSD has capsicum), less software available in repo (again, only when compared with FreeBSD). But hey, NetBSD can count on funds and manpower which are like 2 orders of magnitude more limited than the FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's !

JuvenalUrbino Thank you for your elaborated answer. As usual agreeing with it 😉
Anyway, I don't really care about any downsides. I just love this system 😍

JuvenalUrbino I have smt=off in /etc/rc.conf on my NetBSD servers

I thought that was the default 😮 and that you had to set it to on...
Off to edit my rc.conf ...

Jay

JuvenalUrbino according to this wiki https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/intel_mds/

"You may also want to disable SMT/HyperThreading to address certain aspects of the vulnerabilities. Should you not be able to disable SMT/HT in your BIOS, you can put smtoff=YES in your /etc/rc.conf file."

JuvenalUrbino

Jay sorry, that was a mistake of mine, typed too quickly without thinking first; <variable>=off is clearly not proper rc.conf syntax. Thanks for pointing that out, my mind had completely ignored it, even when @pin quoted me. Gonna edit my post to hold it back from misleading forecoming readers 😉

Jay

JuvenalUrbino happy to help out 🙂

Greemngreek

JuvenalUrbino Brilliant 👏

el-topo

I like the portability focus NetBSD has, there is even a version that runs on the Dreamcast console which is very cool 🙂 Call me silly but I don't like the logo of FreeBSD and it seems too much like Linux which I already run. OpenBSD seems too dependant on one person and locked down. There are other BSDs too but I don't know much about them.

bsdisbetter

I'm a long time user of FreeBSD, BUT, I exclusively use NetBSD on small devices like the Raspberry Pi.
As others have stated, it's a smaller ecosystem, so it does suffer from lack of support for users. I would like to see them put up a better Wiki. If you subscribe to their mailing lists (as I do to some), they are quiet for months on end. Contrast this to FreeBSD where it's daily or hourly multiple messages and discussions.

I really like NetBSD's minimalist approach (by design or by lack of funding, it matters not). I like that they don't bother with ZFS (who really wants that on the desktop - it's a server file system but everyone goes ga-ga over it) and I like that they don't bother with sandboxing or jails. I just like their minimalism.

I personally do not like openbsd. If I want a secure OS, I'd use windows.... 😆

ky0ko

I use a lot of computers with architectures that aren't "popular" nowadays (for desktops and servers at least), so FreeBSD is right out. FreeBSD can run on most (not all) of my PowerMacs, but it can't run on my SGI Indy, or on Alpha, or on NeXT/m68k.

NetBSD supports these just fine and in general with NetBSD I don't have to worry about whether they will continue being supported like I might with OpenBSD (which discontinued the SGI port in 6.5). With NetBSD I can just run the same OS on everything I own, and it just works.

I also appreciate how clean the driver and platform code in NetBSD is, and I've had better experiences with the sorts of folks who use it when asking for help. Perhaps only because questions about troubleshooting relatively obscure hardware older than I am aren't seen as strange there.

Plus I know if I get the strange urge to port NetBSD to something like the Wii or some random MIPS router I found, and I ever actually finish the job, I can probably get the code accepted.

stratact

I'm not a NetBSD user (yet), but I do know my reasons why I would use it over FreeBSD, what I currently use at the moment.

The main thing that appeals to me about NetBSD in particular is its portability. Meaning I could in theory use the same OS on many devices and apply the same knowledge on any of them.

The 2nd thing would be the NetBSD developers and community. How should I say this, you folks are very kind and welcoming. It's mostly the opposite when in FreeBSD's community. The atmosphere here and in the NetBSD IRC is just noticeably much brighter and more pleasing.

The 3rd thing, after talking with @Jay, is that I realized that NetBSD's extreme portability would reflect its very good and flexible coding design. (I even wrote a rhythmic poem saying something about it). The architecture in the code is very phenomenal. So I get the impression the developers really care about their project.

I'm really trying to get NetBSD on my AMD Threadripper workstations. What's holding me back is the need for updated drm kms driver support in the kernel for my amdgpu cards. However I found more likely alternatives to use, such as the Raspberry Pi 4 and my Dell XPS laptop.

I'm hoping to have fun as I go on this journey, learning news things and making friends.

bsdisbetter

ky0ko
What Alpha can you run it on? I have an old AlphaServer DS10 around at work we no longer use I was wondering if I might bring it home and re-purpose it.

bsdisbetter

JuvenalUrbino
I agree with you about documentation, but this reflects the size of the project as you say. Also, very often you can get cross-information from FreeBSD. Yes, this does lead to a steeper learning curve, and on that basis, solely, I would always recommend a new person to *BSDs use FreeBSD initially. I just did a set up for a new FreeBSD user at work the other day, getting her setup running FreeBSD in a VMWare workstation for later migration to the ESXi. (Those two don't like each other but we go there).

But, having agreed with you there, I disagree with the rest. (Friendly of course). I don't want NetBSD to get jails, zfs, sandboxing etc. That's already done by FreeBSD and really it would be a waste of resources to even attempt them. I love that NetBSD still basically uses the same file system that 386BSD used. Rock solid. I think the endearing feature of NetBSD is K.I.S.S. :

ky0ko

bsdisbetter the alpha in question is currently nonfunctioning, temporarily not in my possession, and i don't know the model number, but hopefully all of the above is going to be rectified this weekend

i'd definitely say you should repurpose it! that hardware's fun to play around with even though, if we're being honest here, alpha was a terrible architecture for anything but pure number crunching.

the DS-10 should be a reasonably capable machine. i think you ought to be able to run quake 2 on that, so it passes my minimum bar for general usability 🙂

JuvenalUrbino

ky0ko but it can't run on my SGI Indy,

Oddly enough, my personal 'NetBSD story', which I hadn't told up to this point, starts when I was looking for an OS with concrete support for a Sgi Indy 😛

I endorse your attitude, which not by chance seems tipically NetBSD-ish, and I can align with practically everything you said.

ky0ko or on NeXT/m68k

Are you really saying you own a NeXT station? 😃

PS: I'm positive we met on Mastodon already