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NetBSD 11.0

blog.netbsd.org

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Re: NetBSD 11.0

#51

Post by somat »

haberman wrote: post #29

I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?

I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So I put up with the downsides and am quite happy with it as a desktop system.

Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.

I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#52

Post by spijdar »

Narishma wrote: post #26
cyberpunk wrote: post #20

The release announcement has better details: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html

> gcc(1) - updated to 12.5.0. Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.

It's almost certainly due to supporting platforms like VAX and other, more exotic ISAs. GCC can have weird regressions [0] in "less tested" architectures, so I presume they use a single, known good release across all platforms for consistency's sake.

[0] GCC still supports PDP-11, for example, but for a while modern GCC had some major codegen bugs. Last I checked, the maintainer had made heroic efforts to fixing the bugs, but that's just an example of where bitrot silently renders a target unusable.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#53

Post by jmclnx »

wrxd wrote: post #45
haberman wrote: post #29

I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?

The fediverse has a very vocal group of BSD users. Many of them hang out here: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/public/local

To add to that, many NetBSD people hang out here too:

https://mastodon.sdf.org

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#54

Post by jmclnx »

Narishma wrote: post #26
cyberpunk wrote: post #20

The release announcement has better details: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html

> gcc(1) - updated to 12.5.0. Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.

gcc 15.1 is in pkgsrc 2026Q2:

gcc15-15.2.0nb1 - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) - 15.0 Release Series

As others said, I think it has to do with all the platforms NetBSD supports.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#55

Post by wormius »

Not about BSD, but anybody else using side tabs in FF with that site? Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section. (Linux/Wayland/Debian). Curious if anyone else is seeing it.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#57

Post by mattbillenstein »

somat wrote: post #51
haberman wrote: post #29

I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?

I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So…

For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy.

I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#58

Post by mattbillenstein »

haberman wrote: post #29

I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?

I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#59

Post by efxhoy »

haberman wrote: post #29

I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?

I recently switched my router from pfsense to OpenBSD. I wanted a “vanilla” OS as opposed to a specific router OS like Opnsense.

The setup on openbsd was very straightforward. I had to read up a bit and claude helped getting ipv6 and vlans up. Had I ignored ipv6 it would have been ready in half an hour from just reading man pages and official docs. The only reason ipv6 took longer is because I had no idea how it works.

I researched the equivalent setup on linux and it was much less straightforward. In openbsd I only used software in the base install. For linux there were a lot more choices to make, which for me just made setting it up more difficult. I don’t want to pick a firewall, I just want to configure the simplest possible one.

The only issue I had was the system hanging when no monitor was connected to the hdmi port. I use an old apollo lake mitac pd10ai itx board. Displayport worked fine during install but black screened before I got a shell and crashed. Tried setting some kernel options to disable some display driver without success. Opted to get a dummy hdmi plug instead for reboots without a monitor.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#60

Post by saghm »

wormius wrote: post #55

Not about BSD, but anybody else using side tabs in FF with that site? Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section. (Linux/Wayland/Debian). Curious if anyone else is seeing it.

I just tried opening it (Linux/Wayland/Arch, and I already had number of tabs pinned to the side on Firefox), and I don't seem to have the same issue. I do have some custom styling in my Firefox though (legacy userChrome.css) and have it using my system theme, so that might cause some difference in addition to whatever differences might be in our compositors (not sure if yours is using kwin; I'm also guessing we probably have different versions of the things we do have in common given our distros)
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