Wow. Awesome.

I do think all the BSD, despite how niche it may seems are doing well and in an ongoing development stream. And at least they seem larger than Solaris / Illumos, despite some of the cool tech solaris branch has.

All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).

NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.

OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.

I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.

[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881

One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.

Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.

As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.

Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.

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.

> I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).

DragonFly BSD ([1], [2]): "Am I a joke to you? :-("

;-)

By the way: If you look for a BSD-based desktop OS, have a look at GhostBSD ([3], [4]) (based on FreeBSD) and/or MidnightBSD ([5], [6]) (forked from FreeBSD). Both are under active development.

---

[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD

[3] https://www.ghostbsd.org/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostBSD

[5] https://www.midnightbsd.org/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidnightBSD

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

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

I´m using NetBSD on a couple of x86 machines now that Linux distros have mostly dropped support for them.

I use NetBSD on several systems as a small server platform. I find it easier to understand and customize, and it keeps a lot of this stuff out of the landfill.

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.

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.

I’m using OpenBSD as a daily desktop. The main motivation is that it’s a complete system instead of several projects. So you got simpler userland tools as the kernel interfaces can be easily adjusted.

Also the subsystems are way simpler (packet filtering, sound, network management). Linux is full choke of abstraction which aim to serve a huge range of devices. And I truly believe that there should have been a bifurcation somewhere.

Most software are easy to port around, but there are some that relies on linuxisms (udev) and some on glibc-isms, which can require some patching. Some of the pains I encountered are about device files (usb) and the fact that openbsd relies on root a bit more (mounting with fuse).

You can read the “Absolute OpenBSD, 2ed” book, published 13 years ago and almost everything still holds. You can even read the “Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD” and still have a good understanding of the OpenBSD design. Linux is chaotic land compared to that.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the BSDs got an increase in users purely due to AI models making it far more accessible / easier to hack on.

i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.

are you asking these questions sincerely or is this just your passive-aggressive way of saying that netbsd is dead and nobody uses it? and why does everything have to be compared to linux? isn't the whole reason we developed free and open-source operating systems is to have lots of different choices and not just one universal corporate-controlled OS that everyone thinks of as the yardstick by which all other OSes are measured?

The current status? If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs.

But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the road less traveled.

> gcc(1) - updated to 12.5.0.

Anyone know why they are still on such an old version? The latest version is 16.1.

Check out https://smolbsd.org/

Afaik it has always been that way. I remember 20 years ago as I was dabbling with various bsds, OpenBSD was known for security, FreeBSD for features and netbsd for small, ultra portable kernel.

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)

> Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?

New x64 systems? Probably not. But since it still supports x86 and a whole slew of other architectures[1] still that don't always, it probably wouldn't make sense to stop.

[1]https://www.netbsd.org/ports/

One thing ISOs are useful for is installation under a hypervisor, or BMC. You can usually do the exact same thing with USB images, but a lot of the UI/workflows are oriented around .iso files.

NetBSD even supports installing from floppies on old systems if you don´t have a CD-ROM drive.

> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write. Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?

NetBSD literally maintains support for VAX. Your mental model of expected hardware isn't exactly wrong in the general case, but it's also not exactly applicable here.

I am guessing, but many of us still use CDs / DVDs (/BluRays?) to make backups. It's cheap. Lasts long.

> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write.

You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?

Flash storage can’t sit on the shelf without bitrot as long as CD-R and DVD-R can, even though writable optical media itself isn’t the best for durability.

CD-RW/DVD+RW on the other hand are also even worse than flash in that regard and decay very quickly in my experience.

> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write. Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?

I mean, you could also ask "why use NetBSD when Linux or even Windows is much more ubiquitous and much easier to install?", but I feel like that would be missing the point. Once you're off the beaten path, you have to update your priors a bit about how likely it is to need to support something that isn't as common.

>Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?

Old Systems. I have one such system that will is in line to move to 11.0 from 9.3. To do that I will boot from CDROM. It does not have any USB ports.

NetBSD is probably the only UN*X Type OS that can run on many of these 32 bit systems. Plus the NetBSD team is doing their best to support these old systems.

That saves me $ and helps the environment a little bit :)

Blit the iso to a usb stick and boot it. If your PC is recent (made in the past 15-20 years or so), it'll understand it just fine.

Desktop use is probably the best option for daily driver, since almost everything on the motherboard has support, most likely.

Does it have Bluetooth, because OpenBSD still doesn't.

Nowhere near as Linux, some can be better than others.

As someone who has used old BSDs, I can say from direct experience that it does not.

For starters, on the old BSDs there was no Almquist shell, unless you went to Usenet, grabbed the shar, and built it. The TENEX C shell was the hot new thing, as were BIND and Sendmail. And we got genuine Joy+Horton vi.

Whereas modern NetBSD does not have Sendmail any more, has nvi2, and supports access control lists. And of course under the covers has lots of things that the old BSDs didn't have, like UFS for TiB disc volumes and kqueue.

I've heard tell that they're even thinking of finally doing away with BIND in base.

What do you mean, it's as modern as a standard portable operating system gets.