dressupgeekout It sounds like your friend is going 100% off of reputation and vibes, and hasn't bothered to even look into what NetBSD's got going for it.
Above all, why in the world should anybody care if a random acquaintance of theirs decides to run a niche operating system as their daily driver?
pfr He tells me NetBSD is for routers and I should switch to FreeBSD or OpenBSD
Why is he even aware of the existence of *BSD? I have friends with degrees in computer science, who only (if ever at all) heard of BSD UNIX while studying C and OS history.
pfr Anyone got any nuggets of wisdom they can share with me that I can pass along?
I regard the act of having to justify software choices (especially when it comes to obscure vs mainstream) as a waste of time.
dressupgeekout Aside -- it's been very interesting collecting anecdotes about people's attitudes toward my favorite OS.
Once I met a professional pentester who had been running FreeBSD at some point and she said that had never heard of anybody in the world (physical or virtual) running NetBSD anywhere.