I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights:
- they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!]
- they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!)
- they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional")
and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :(
Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
I, too, loved the old logo. Not being of a nationality that has been involved in the pacific war though had kept the iwo jima reference hidden to me.
They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects.
The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well.
The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird.
Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS.
The 1.6 series was the last to use the old-style version of up to three version levels. 2.0 was the start of the version.release scheme.
I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system.
I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years.
I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431
I liked Beastie as the FreeBSD logo as well, he's still on the page but the logo is now some sort of red bulbous thing, that still somehow resembles the mascot.
my favorite OS .. fond memories of resurrecting a sparc64, a sparc, a hppa, an i386 next to the amd64s, and feeling right at home with all of them at once.
...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D)
...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(
Are you sure about the HPPAs? When I had them, there was only Linux for them, also not any distro, but only Debian without too much fuss.
edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
somewhat. It's been quite a while and I do remember that hppa was one of the machines in my .. pillage pile of plundering (like an sun U1, a U2, an U-what-was-it-60? three flavors of sparc, an SGI workstation and various other UNIX pizza boxes) and my memory tells me except for the SGI we had them all running at some point (might've been hp300, hp700, should've been prior to hppa renaming. Looking at the numbers, hp700 sounds more familiar).
The purpose of these boxes was indeed to offer shell access to students for the fighting the lemmings exercises (a series of C quizzes with regression tests aimed at showing students the pitfalls of non-portable programming), and we did have quite the variety..
But memory lies, so no, I'm not absolutely sure.
No problem. Doesn't really matter. I wasn't absolutely sure either. It may have been that at the times some support has been available in the beginning, but one could only netboot it, also only in -current. Since I've been lazy then I avoided tracking that. Later on it may have been better, but since I've riced the Debian sufficiently I probably didn't bother anymore. Even more later I moved on physically and gifted all that non-X86 stuff away anyways.
I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore
Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still
I believe there may be a patch for the IDE drive mod for NetBSD somewhere about the net.
There is also the serial to SD card adapter but I dont know if there is a patch for that in NetBSD.
Of course you can't boot from either without a custom bios(for the ide mod. No booting from SD adapter period)
I don't think there is any operating system or widely used software where there isn't a "$group called it dead ages ago" example. it tells us absolutely nothing interesting, and isn't funny.
I'll never understand why HN hates humor so much. You could say it's dumb humor, but a community that can't even tolerate dumb tongue in cheek mischief isn't much of a community at all in my opinion.
A part of me still would prefer the Slashdot way of organizing threads: +1 funny doesn't boost your karma, and (it's been a long time, but iirc) the page can be sorted chronologically instead of by upvotes.
The calculations back then placed OpenBSD as being less used than NetBSD. While neither of those two BSD seem to have die, or perhaps just wasn't informed of their demise, OpenBSD looks to have overtaken NetBSD in usage (and news coverage).
Sometimes it takes very long for things to die definitively.
"The BSDs are dieing" is definitely a (false) meme but there's some truth to that.
On a lot of things the BSD are either cut out or lagging behind by a lot.
Example for both things:
Being cut out: containers and kubernetes. Heck, you can even have MS-Windows-based kubernetes workers, whereas just yesterday some random guy released an experimental oci-compliant, jail-based container runtime (IIRC). And that's for FreeBSD, does not even apply to Net/Open/Dragonfly/whatever.
Lagging behind: wayland. Mostly working on GNU/Linux, what's the status on the various BSDs? Not pretty.
So to wrap up: it kinda depends on your point of view.
If your use case falls within what's supported and what the developers develop for, then the BSDs are alive and doing well.
Otherwise, the BSDs appear to be dieing very slowly.
Sure. Hardware producers have zero interest in supporting hardware they don't sell anymore, and if they sell a newer version that competes with the old then such maintenance is doubly costly - as it cuts into potential sales. But they can rely on developer laziness to eventually render what would otherwise be a durable good - into a consumable that must be constantly replaced in a predictable cycle. See the entirety of the smartphone market, for example.
Apple chose its logo well, it is well documented that they've crippled functional hardware through software updates - turning hardware into a perishable good. But Android might provide the best example of grotesquely wasteful consumerism - only made possible by the ever dependable, and yet somehow still plausibly deniable, software bit rot.
No they aren't, that is the point made when: the deprecation is announced, preprocessor flags are added to cordon off the code and throw compilation warnings, finally - the code is deleted. The burden is then shifted onto the hardware producer to maintain their now disconnected code, and adapt to breaking changes blindly made by anyone not accounting for the situation (basically everyone). This obviously doesn't happen, because maintaining code for hardware they no longer sell isn't profitable. At most, the manufacturers will offer a few pre-compiled blobs for the most popular system configurations - which really sucks for anyone who actually subscribes to the ideals originally espoused by free software proponents.
you can fork stuff and keep rebasing things around and/or maintain your own fork, I guess.
> which really sucks for anyone who actually subscribes to the ideals originally espoused by free software proponents.
the ideals of free software is for software to be free (according to the four fundamental freedoms) and not to work on all and every hardware and to maintain software indefinitely. anything besides the four foundamental freedoms is BS.
> the ideals of free software is for software to be free (according to the four fundamental freedoms)...
No, it is to ensure that people are free - as software doesn't know the difference. Would you deny the existence of business strategies that endeavor to curtail such freedom, or do you view those as okeydokey 'cause SaaS wasn't explicitly mentioned by the FSF in the 80s?
Nah. SMP support predates NetBSD 5.0 by a decade or so. May sound like nitpicking but .. roundabout 11, 12 years ago was when the default kernel config switched to SMP on all architectures where it made sense. Before users had to enable it themselves. alpha & sparc64 SMP, I'm pretty sure, is quite older e.g.
I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.
It was not a sarcastic comment. I checked the release notes and found nothing about it. It's true that i haven't checked the development of BSDs lately. I remember just that only Dragonfly had a working SMP kernel, with FreeBSD strugling and OpenBSD just ignoring this issue. But this was around 8 years ago.
OpenBSD does support SMP since 2004, FreeBSD even earlier.
You seem to confuse SMP with Intel's "HyperThreading", which is disabled on OpenBSD due to security concerns (SPECTRE et al.) and which makes sense to default to in an OS that takes security seriously.
SMP and HyperThreading are completely different things.
Awesome news. If anyone wants to try NetBSD today there's a public access UNIX system (est. 1987) called the Super Dimensional Fortress that runs NetBSD. I'm a lifetime member: http://jart.sdf.org/ Also any programs you build with Cosmopolitan Libc will automatically work on NetBSD. As an OS, it's managed to stay really close to the roots all these years. It has good production use cases as an operating system too, since of all the modern unix systems NetBSD probably has the most accurate rusage accounting.
TL;DR: Odds are though if you installed NetBSD, once you got past the learning curve (less than a week) it is about as different from any Linux as Debian is from Fedora - enough things to be annoying, but not enough that you notice most of the time.
Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use.
If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there.
Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
Aside from the obvious BSD things (clean separation of base and third-party software, very different networking stack, etc), notable NetBSD things include a lot more security and hardening features enabled by default, a powerful and versatile default package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.
If you want/need the same packages on Linux, macOS, other, then you can use the same code on all of those platforms. No needs to worry about using {Homebrew, Macports} on your Mac and {Deb, RPM} on your Linux infrastructure.
A long time ago I maintained my own Linux from Scratch [1] installation using pkgsrc rather than BLFS or something ad hoc. It worked surprisingly well. It was a bit like Gentoo (whih is what I had migrated from.) Fun times!
I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.
NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.
61 comments
[ 107 ms ] story [ 1359 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2
https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg
I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd...
but then suddenly:
- they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!]
- they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!)
- they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional")
and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :(
Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects.
The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well.
The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird.
Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS.
I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system.
I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years.
I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431
...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D)
...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(
edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore
Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still
This announcement is clearly a mistake.
It's called Irony, and it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN.
It's sarcasm. And if we can't tell if something's a bad take or sarcasm, that's a good reason to downvote.
An alternate understanding is that people are not as funny as they think they are.
https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying
A part of me still would prefer the Slashdot way of organizing threads: +1 funny doesn't boost your karma, and (it's been a long time, but iirc) the page can be sorted chronologically instead of by upvotes.
Sometimes it takes very long for things to die definitively.
"The BSDs are dieing" is definitely a (false) meme but there's some truth to that.
On a lot of things the BSD are either cut out or lagging behind by a lot.
Example for both things:
Being cut out: containers and kubernetes. Heck, you can even have MS-Windows-based kubernetes workers, whereas just yesterday some random guy released an experimental oci-compliant, jail-based container runtime (IIRC). And that's for FreeBSD, does not even apply to Net/Open/Dragonfly/whatever.
Lagging behind: wayland. Mostly working on GNU/Linux, what's the status on the various BSDs? Not pretty.
So to wrap up: it kinda depends on your point of view.
If your use case falls within what's supported and what the developers develop for, then the BSDs are alive and doing well.
Otherwise, the BSDs appear to be dieing very slowly.
And other times it occurs very quickly and for no good reason. Linux gleefully deletes functionality like hardware accelerated framebuffer scrolling, because the devs can't be bothered to decouple code or maintain existing work. It is interesting because 15 years ago I'd have assumed it to be a byproduct of a free software virality strategy - making the use of outside code as painful as possible by providing no stability beyond exported GPL symbols. But now, with the wildly successful corporate push in Open™ Source©, I'm starting to wonder if it is just a happy accident that software-defined planned obsolescence is now a thing. All those GPL vs BSD licensed code debates... funny how things work out.
Apple chose its logo well, it is well documented that they've crippled functional hardware through software updates - turning hardware into a perishable good. But Android might provide the best example of grotesquely wasteful consumerism - only made possible by the ever dependable, and yet somehow still plausibly deniable, software bit rot.
patches are welcome, I guess
> which really sucks for anyone who actually subscribes to the ideals originally espoused by free software proponents.
the ideals of free software is for software to be free (according to the four fundamental freedoms) and not to work on all and every hardware and to maintain software indefinitely. anything besides the four foundamental freedoms is BS.
No, it is to ensure that people are free - as software doesn't know the difference. Would you deny the existence of business strategies that endeavor to curtail such freedom, or do you view those as okeydokey 'cause SaaS wasn't explicitly mentioned by the FSF in the 80s?
I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.
You seem to confuse SMP with Intel's "HyperThreading", which is disabled on OpenBSD due to security concerns (SPECTRE et al.) and which makes sense to default to in an OS that takes security seriously.
SMP and HyperThreading are completely different things.
Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use.
If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there.
Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
That's multi-platform as well.
If you want/need the same packages on Linux, macOS, other, then you can use the same code on all of those platforms. No needs to worry about using {Homebrew, Macports} on your Mac and {Deb, RPM} on your Linux infrastructure.
[1] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/
I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.
NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.
A great OS that is very under appreciated, very under represented, and very under respected.