I just replaced Gentoo GNU/Linux with NetBSD on my mobile
lab's laptops. An OS focused on portability is a great idea.
The install is very gentle and more friendly-seeming than
OpenBSD's. It wasn't obvious to me initially that networking
defaults would get set up by configuring the network for
downloading sets via ftp (if this is your normal network,
would you like to have this written to /etc to enable it on
boot?).
*I think I've seen that nm03 uses NetBSD sometimes.
I think everything works so well and instantly because
NetBSD focuses on portability, in contrast to OpenBSD which
strives for correctness. OpenBSD consistently died a few
seconds after booting after a successful install on some of
the same laptops, I speculate probably because of late
arriving weird firmware signals such as those about power
saving modes. The many firmware 'features' are truly bad and
generally discontinued, so they are kind of accidents of
history I believe. I should look into that more / actually
tell the openbsd people about it, but this phlog is about
NetBSD.
Netbsd has a binary package utility/package source called
pkgin that seems a little bit like Debian's apt. (pkgin
search emacs, pkgin install emacs). I notice that the emacs
is emacs 26, so kind of a blast from the past. I guess it
was a good call not moving to emacs 27, because of some of
the lousy problems that appeared there.
The display manager can be enabled by default during install
(xdm? I forgot now.), the default window manager is cwm
which seems fine. I don't know how to customise keyboard
accelerators for it yet though. Left click -> terminal ->
start app from there is what I am doing so far.
I don't understand NetBSD's frameworks yet. There doesn't
seem to be a way to get sndio on it for audio. Instead of
OpenBSD httpd, NetBSD has tiny and super-light bozohttpd. I
think this is probably actually good for fiddling around in
some sense, but it stresses me out not having OpenBSD's easy
casual security norms.
sbcl works easy because the portability focus doesn't
include OpenBSD's paranoia against wxallowed, I guess. So
you can (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "foo.sbcl") and sbcl
--core foo.sbcl happily on your /home mount. Obviously the
partitions and mounts aren't openbsd's. There are basically
none of the mitigations I'm used to. No unveil or pledge.
Easy access to sbcl means super high lispy speed (sbcl is a
top 10 fast program compiler), though I still like my Kyoto
lisp descendant ECL's C sffi norms (which is also in NetBSD
ports).
This is actually good, in that netbsd achieves great
portability and working-out-of-the-box-ivity. It's so much
nicer than the usual linuxens on that front. The trade off
for the portability is that you need to think more about
your personal security and not taking risks. There's no
jailkit either actually.
So I love that installing is a friendly and relaxing breeze
and the defaults all resilient against terrible and obscure
firmware from a decade ago, but the lack of OpenBSD's
security norms/mitigations stresses me out. I would
definitely recommend this over the beginner-catching
GNU/linux distributions for ease of use and sane portability
focused defaults.
I guess not being GNU is kind of a drawback, but it's just
not the 80s any more, and linux hasn't been pro-GNU for
decades at this point. There isn't an analogy to Gentoo
GNU/linux's @FREE license set USE, eg.
Now, can I easily build jns' eternity under netbsd is the
question or do I need to fall back to Gentoo.
