There's the Installing Linux on a dead badger HOWTO, but NetBSD actually runs everywhere for realsies. It's also lovely to work with and has the nicest man pages imho.
How usable are the BSDs as a GUI daily driver? Like 99% of Linux applications work out of the box or more like 50%?
With new CVEs being discovered in ancient bedrock code on the daily, it seems prudent to switch to a NetBSD/OpenBSD/Qubes system for the next few years until some vulnerabilities might get smoothed over.
I use FreeBSD on all my machines for everything sinc about 11 years GUI is I3/X11/AMD-Card everything works, but please test it yourself, it's like with linux, you just know what's not/is working if you use it daily for all your edge-cases (maybe your scanner, maybe your barcode-scanner your Bluetooth-Stuff your wireless etcetc)
Overall i really love FreeBSD for everything computing (Pi/Laptop/Workstation/Servers).
And the community is great...wanna make a port/src-patch?...just send it to the bug-tracker, no rituals needed ;)
they get accepted or rejected, updating ports/packets would be a wonderful AI job, check newest version, update port, poudriere the thing, test it, make patch, send to bugtracker.
Maybe the AI can even check "funny" upstream commits like it happens with npm/crate and block that stuff.
But FreeBSD ports is incredible up to date so there should be no flood of patches anyhow.
Indeed. This might be naive but it would be grand if projects could have their own models and compute with which to perform these and other tasks, each trained as per the project's ethos/needs.-
This is way too expensive. Models are an inherently centralizing technology, and there's no future for niche projects that don't make up a big part of the major providers training sets.
NetBSD 11 with Firefox 151 from pkgsrc on a custom CTWM is a usable daily driver for Emacs daemon mode GUI/TUI and console tmux simultaneous use. Remote in from a Windows or macOS desktop.
It has a working X11 with DRM from linux as base so everything graphical will work mostly fine. The issue is more around the OS and some subsystems. OpenBSD is still using the Giant Lock model, so SMP can be an issue. Linux has more independent subsystems so heavy processing is unlikely to impact usb audio (which is an issue I have with my oldish laptop). Another issue is the input subsystem (wscons framework) which is not as sophisticated as Linux Input subsystem. In general, linux subsystems are more sophisticated/complex than their OpenBSD counterpart, but the latter work well enough.
There are some linuxisms in some applications (the recent moves to wayland/systemd,...) but they're mostly easy to port.
Microsoft brought up an new processor[0][1][2] with NetBSD...
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=524...
[1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/an-onli...
There's the Installing Linux on a dead badger HOWTO, but NetBSD actually runs everywhere for realsies. It's also lovely to work with and has the nicest man pages imho.
How usable are the BSDs as a GUI daily driver? Like 99% of Linux applications work out of the box or more like 50%?
With new CVEs being discovered in ancient bedrock code on the daily, it seems prudent to switch to a NetBSD/OpenBSD/Qubes system for the next few years until some vulnerabilities might get smoothed over.
I use FreeBSD on all my machines for everything sinc about 11 years GUI is I3/X11/AMD-Card everything works, but please test it yourself, it's like with linux, you just know what's not/is working if you use it daily for all your edge-cases (maybe your scanner, maybe your barcode-scanner your Bluetooth-Stuff your wireless etcetc)
Overall i really love FreeBSD for everything computing (Pi/Laptop/Workstation/Servers).
And the community is great...wanna make a port/src-patch?...just send it to the bug-tracker, no rituals needed ;)
I really wonder what will become of these systems once AI agents start intervening en masse - sending patches and the like.-
they get accepted or rejected, updating ports/packets would be a wonderful AI job, check newest version, update port, poudriere the thing, test it, make patch, send to bugtracker.
Maybe the AI can even check "funny" upstream commits like it happens with npm/crate and block that stuff.
But FreeBSD ports is incredible up to date so there should be no flood of patches anyhow.
Indeed. This might be naive but it would be grand if projects could have their own models and compute with which to perform these and other tasks, each trained as per the project's ethos/needs.-
This is way too expensive. Models are an inherently centralizing technology, and there's no future for niche projects that don't make up a big part of the major providers training sets.
The cross build tooling, specifically around build.sh, makes the process of building a kernel + userland straight forward.
Use your best build hardware to build for your test hardware.
NetBSD 11 with Firefox 151 from pkgsrc on a custom CTWM is a usable daily driver for Emacs daemon mode GUI/TUI and console tmux simultaneous use. Remote in from a Windows or macOS desktop.
CTWM Claude's Tab Window Manager
- https://www.ctwm.org/index.html
that's one confusing title in $currentyear...
It took me one serious doubletake ...
Running OpenBSD as a daily driver but with no DE.
It has a working X11 with DRM from linux as base so everything graphical will work mostly fine. The issue is more around the OS and some subsystems. OpenBSD is still using the Giant Lock model, so SMP can be an issue. Linux has more independent subsystems so heavy processing is unlikely to impact usb audio (which is an issue I have with my oldish laptop). Another issue is the input subsystem (wscons framework) which is not as sophisticated as Linux Input subsystem. In general, linux subsystems are more sophisticated/complex than their OpenBSD counterpart, but the latter work well enough.
There are some linuxisms in some applications (the recent moves to wayland/systemd,...) but they're mostly easy to port.
I wonder if the popularity of NetBSD for research has to do with how easy it is to compile a version of NetBSD with favorable licenses.
You can opt to build it yourself and exclude anything that is not 2-clause BSD licensed, as some drivers and such are if I recall correctly.
Some real copium lmao ;)
Makes me wonder - in the year of Astra and Fable what prevents people from building bespoke BSDs for their hardware rapidly now?
What kind of customizations would you want that requires that degree of change?