Moat portable OS in the history of computing.
It supports like 20 more architectures than Linux, including VAX 780 from 1979(!!!) that can run it out of the box - same source codeBASE as in x86 or ARM etc.
NetBSD 11.0
151–160 of 172 posts
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've used OpenBSD for probably 20 years and never had any problem with the filesystem. What is your concern?
I can explain what is my (maybe irrational) fear: I am working on my desktop or laptop, I get a power cut or the laptop battery run out, when I reboot the filesystem is unrecoverable and I loose 4 hours rebuilding the system and recovering from backup. So it is not really about loosing recent files but the potential time lost (usually at the worst/busiest moment).
I suppose it's possible, but I have had dozens of power cuts and never been unable to recover or lost any important data. Perhaps I have lost some temporary files in a browser cache or something like that and just never noticed. Everything I really care about is backed up anyway, as it should be because robust file systems aside, physical failure of storage media is also a possibility on any system.
The fsck can be a bit annoying compared to rebooting with a journaled file system, but it has never failed to recover for me.
The "softdep" (soft updates) mount option was eliminated in release 7.4 and I cannot say whether that has made the file system more or less reliable but the stated reason it was removed was because it was poorly understood and complex code. "It is too clever for us to continue maintaining as it is."
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would the C code no longer compile if it conforms to the spec?
There is more than one C specification, and with each new release of GCC several things that used to emit warnings are newly treated as errors.
but if the correct standard is specified as an option, shouldn't that prevent conformant applications from failing to compile in newer versions?
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would the C code no longer compile if it conforms to the spec?
"The spec" is loose in places and is full of undefined behavior which can change from compiler to compiler. Very low level code tends to hit these types of issues much more than application code would. But these types of issues are even common in large userspace codebases.
To me, undefined behavior is by default not conformant, so that wouldn't count for the purposes of my question.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO an operating system in 2026 that still has a command which, when run without any arguments ("ldconfig"), silently bricks your entire system without warning... is probably due for some changes. The same command on other OSes does not cause such damage.
https://man.netbsd.org/ldconfig.8 states that it checks the contents of /etc/ld.so.conf - what is the default configuration of that file when it is installed? Is it empty?
Non-existent for me on a default install
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays, the journalized filesystems of Linux, and also NTFS of Windows are quite mature and many of their early bugs have been fixed. Many years ago that was not true. In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of computer crashes caused by power failures. All the HDDs using journalized filesystems were corrupted sooner or later, including NTFS, ext3, reiserfs, XFS. The only filesystem that was…
> The only filesystem that was completely unaffected by any power failure was UFS, on FreeBSD (obviously with "soft updates" enabled). And with "completely unaffected" you mean the internal (meta-data) consistency was maintained, recent user data changes were silently lost however.
No filesystem, regardless of what kind of journaling is used, can guarantee anything else except that after a power failure you will get the same filesystem as it was a few minutes before the power failure.
If there was anything written to the HDD/SSD during those minutes, it would be lost.
For better guarantees than this you need special hardware, e.g. SSDs with big capacitors that can maintain the local power supply for a fraction of a second, during which the SSD controller can flush to non-volatile storage all buffered data.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, and the project maintains many pieces of software people take for granted, like pf, openssh, and libressl. FreeBSD is definitely the most robust, and is a very good server OS. NetBSDs niche is how many platforms can run it. If it's supported by GCC, theres a decent chance NetBSD will run on it
OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.
... then there's Qubes OS, which beats the pants off AOSP isolation using Xen. Feels like the labelled desktop of the Trusted Solaris days! If one wanted to utilize SELinux in TemplateVMs for further hardening, that is always an option.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prob…
Yeah that could be. Plenty of issues could cause it (though I am using KWin as compositor). Maybe it's fixed by now, or just a glitch on my end. EDIT: This is weird. My monitor has different modes including sRGB. I had it in a gaming mode (higher contrast, etc...) and it shows then, but in sRGB it doesn't show. I took screenshots and when viewing there, regardless of screen mode, it's rendering fine, so clearly it mu…
Messing more with it, it seems to be related to the combo of sRGB being less bright/contrast than the non-sRGB modes, thus not enough to see the dots...
Zooming in (ctrl-wheelup) on the page causes it to disappear after the dots scale to the next size. Friend pointed out I can disable and test the css, which I did. I scaled to 2, and it's gone. So it's a scaling issue.
Then tried Vivaldi, same thing, turns out, it's gotta be a scaling issue with KDE/Kwin. It also only does it with 1440, not on 1080 (or 900, which I also tested). They're all 16:9 so it must not be a fractional scaling issue, maybe density just gets weird or it's the monitor in combo.
I have no idea whey I'm sharing just found it interesting in case anyone else wonders or notices.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that could be. Plenty of issues could cause it (though I am using KWin as compositor). Maybe it's fixed by now, or just a glitch on my end. EDIT: This is weird. My monitor has different modes including sRGB. I had it in a gaming mode (higher contrast, etc...) and it shows then, but in sRGB it doesn't show. I took screenshots and when viewing there, regardless of screen mode, it's rendering fine, so clearly it mu…
Messing more with it, it seems to be related to the combo of sRGB being less bright/contrast than the non-sRGB modes, thus not enough to see the dots... Zooming in (ctrl-wheelup) on the page causes it to disappear after the dots scale to the next size. Friend pointed out I can disable and test the css, which I did. I scaled to 2, and it's gone. So it's a scaling issue. Then tried Vivaldi, same thing, turns out, it's…
Stuff like this always ends up being way more complicated to my than I initially expect! In a certain sense, we're a bit spoiled by how all of these complex pieces do actually work the way they're intended most of the time, which makes it easy to forget just how many layers there are.
I was also on a 2560x1440 monitor, and I had 1.5x scaling configured. I doubt I would have even thought of suggesting you check what mode you monitor was in even if I was on my desktop rather than my laptop.
> I have no idea whey I'm sharing just found it interesting in case anyone else wonders or notices.
I actually really like that you've followed up with all of the new details you found! I've been on the other side of stuff like this enough to appreciate when the DenverCoder9's of the world share their wisdom: https://xkcd.com/979/
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#160I hope AI will help niche operating systems like BSD reach a point where they can be used as practical daily drivers
NetBSD specifically prohibits AI contributions as far as I'm aware of -and thank god for it!