NetBSD

Reader supplied reviews for NetBSD Average rating 7.4 from 16 review(s) What are your thoughts on NetBSD? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- pkgsrc11.010.29.58.37.26.1.55.15.04.03.13.02.12.01.6 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 11.0 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-09-08 Country: Poland Votes: 3 Love it, very much. For being a _very_ lean OS that's technologically very simple and easy to tinker. But it has some deal-breaking cons. Speaking of "cons", first thing you'll prolly notice (if you come from any other country than those english-speaking) is lack of UTF-8 in wscons(8) console. Then that DEL and Backspace do the same thing, again related to wscons (Both this and UTF-8 support work normally in X11). One needs to make an appropriate .editrc file and (on PS/2 keyboards) also separate Backspace from the DEL key in wscons.conf (Recommended mailling list thread: "That DEL key thing...") Also hardware support might be bit behind (For example, 10.0's Direct Rendering Manager system was only on par with Linux 5.1 from 2021 (?)), and wireless support so far is still nonexistent beyond few adapters running on abysmal G (54mbps) speeds (progress is reported to be made, tho). So make sure you can use ethernet, which will be your only friend. Also, could never KASLR kernel to boot for some reason, tried on a lot of amd64 computers by now. As for the pluses, well, there's a lot going IMO... Foremostly that, again, it's a very light OS. on i386 it can get as low as 60MB RAM (with caches) or 90MB with default X11 setup The installation is ludicrously fast, even including potential restarts (Personal record under two minutes (Full Distribution minus the comp.tgz aka compiler set) on a HDD!) The installer is not the best, altho honestly I know no hassle-free installer other than Debian's. It has also vastly improved since 9.3 (aka when I originally tried NetBSD) The other thing that NetBSD is truly simple. Nothing getting into the way on any layer. Its workings are straightforward from the CTWM-based GUI all to the very boot process. For example, turning root read-only (officially unsupported on amd64 port) is nothing but few files in /etc and the entropy-file moved to /var. It's the only OS I could manage to grasp, I feel, all the ins and outs of it. rc.d is just superior to any other Unix init system out there, I believe. It's like a combination of systemd's simple startup scripts combined with sysvinit's reliability and flexibility. And unlike both, the "maintenance mode" aka single-user is done properly; it merely brings up the kernel and _nothing_ is ran beyond the shell. Personally hate that sysvinit/ systemd notoriously delaying all the maintenance because it tries the mount the broken partition I am about to fix... Unless somehow /home is needed for booting single-user too, lol pkgsrc is a simple (not as in easy to use, though!) port system which, in my opinion, is the most reliable ports system out there. Its usage might not be the friendliest, documentation needs some digging since it's niche (it could, however, list the most common make commands in some manpage), but it does the very task of producing customised software very well Some other components / utilities worth a highlight: The very nice gpt(8) partitioning tool, ifconfig network configuration, simple wakeonlan WoL util, pkgin binary package manager... Ultimately, it's highly underrated OS that while not for everyone (and not for all hardware), provides an unique powerful platform for many usecases and revitalises otherwise hopelessly-outdated hardware Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 11.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-08-28 Country: Germany Votes: 16 After more than 14 years with BSDs, I have finally convinced myself to try NetBSD as one of my daily drivers again. I am absolutely impressed. pkgsrc is a godsend on illumos, and NetBSD is where it comes from and remains to be maintained. The system itself is incredibly fast and reliable, once you survived the rather antique installation menu. (I found Gentoo to be less confusing than NetBSD when setting up the WiFi connection, but that's a case for YMMV.) I can only recommend to try NetBSD if you don't absolutely need closed-source software that isn't packaged for it. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 10.1 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-15 Votes: 83 I Started with Windows like most people, it was such a pain with neverending VC++ redistributable or .Net framework installation needing more than 40 mins before trying a program and neverending checkdisk after an abrupt shutdown (because BSOD,crash or shortage).After i came to Ubuntu, user-friendly but far cleaner to use than Windows, i needed some time to find equivalent software, choose between the possibilities and fix small bugs with some softwares but after that i had the most responsive and stable system i ever had.Now i'm on Debian Stable, Same than Ubuntu but a step higher and i'm happy with it. I tried to understand BSD and why i could need it and now with NetBSD, i understand. A totally clean, understandable and efficient system compatible with as much hardware and software it is possible while keeping these purposes. being POSIX compliant (the standard making possible to compile a good/clean C software written 40 years ago like a libc or bsdutils, we are far from the problem of a software written for windows XP and broken for 7 and later). NetBSD is modern too, for example, it seems easy to write a clean code in C for an asynchronous server with kqueue (think about a clean node.js in C /FastCGI). NetBSD is the real descendant of the UNIX spirit. all this speech to say that, for a pure computer expert (those writing reliable, efficient, concise and clean C code, using system calls, POSIX compliant, easy to maintain and understand 40 years later) that i'm not but i hope i will be one day, NetBSD is the graal (only with a computer degree and a strong motivation). note: the last NetBSD 10.1 is compatible with graphics acceleration of recent Intel CPU (the intel driver for Linux being probably far easier to port than AMD/NVIDIA ones), so, NetBSD could be used as main OS on desktop (i'm sceptic on laptop because of wifi firmware but i never tried ...) and to develop with OpenGL (for examples games or any 2D/3D apps). note2: how to not laugh when we see people running netBSD 10.1 on the Nintendo Wii. Thanks to the NetBSD team who are amazing engineers and the most pleasant geeks at the same time (the NetBSD toaster). Was this review helpful? 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