I meant in the sense that since NetBSD supports soooo many devices, it can also help innovation in other kernels if need be as well by being able to take driver support via its rumpkernel as well if need be
And to be honest, I feel like there is this sense of freedom knowing that you can have a system which is portable, if some script can run on my pc on netbsd, chances are if its not too specific, it could run on your pc or even your toaster lol!
Netbsd can run on any device possible and I really appreciate it.
>Surely the project has to have more selling points than "can be compiled with a single script."
Personally I have only heard good things about netbsd but I don't have much expertise in it (sorry), I can recommend you to take a look at smolbsd which looks really cool for uni-kernel purposes as well
> Netbsd can run on any device possible and I really appreciate it.
That's more of a meme than reality and I wish people would actually look into it before mindlessly repeating the trope. I did, when I wanted to run a new OS on a niche device, and the reality is very different. Nowadays Linux works on a lot more hardware than NetBSD does. Yes, NetBSD nominally supports a few more architectures than Linux (very few, especially that μClinux is now upstreamed), but the driver situation for the rest of the system means that it can't run on most devices from those architecture anyway.
This and 'runs' is a very relative term. What exactly works, what doesn't? What do you need? How power efficient or buggy is it? How is the performance? I remember running Linux on an SGI Indy. Not everything worked, as not every Indy was equal (I had six) but also compared to IRIX (especially 5.x series) the performance was dog slow. The Indy had some good hardware (like the soundcard or Indycam) but that wouldn't work (well) on Linux. My Octane 2 didn't have 3D accelerated graphics on Linux. The state of every port isn't equal. Same on OpenBSD. Furthermore, if you run Linux your distribution of choice may not be available or work well.
Note that for most of the more esoteric platforms NetBSD supports, “support” simply means they continue to cross-compile to target that platform. There’s been lots of cases where there’s some major regression that makes a port unusable (can’t boot, can’t interact with the system, etc) and nobody notices for years because there’s both nobody testing these ports and nobody actually using them. At that point, the value of the support is questionable.
I meant in the sense that since NetBSD supports soooo many devices, it can also help innovation in other kernels if need be as well by being able to take driver support via its rumpkernel as well if need be
And to be honest, I feel like there is this sense of freedom knowing that you can have a system which is portable, if some script can run on my pc on netbsd, chances are if its not too specific, it could run on your pc or even your toaster lol!
https://laughingsquid.com/netbsd-toaster/
Netbsd can run on any device possible and I really appreciate it.
>Surely the project has to have more selling points than "can be compiled with a single script."
Personally I have only heard good things about netbsd but I don't have much expertise in it (sorry), I can recommend you to take a look at smolbsd which looks really cool for uni-kernel purposes as well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582758
I feel like that there is a lot more things that can be done with netbsd as well or other open source projects in general as well