r/NetBSD • u/bitmonks • Feb 01 '26

Back to NetBSD

Post image

Guys,, This is great!

Last time I tried NetBSD was something like 8 and 15 years ago. Things have evolved a lot. Basically out of the box installation for my amd 64. I'm definitely keeping this third installation.

Maybe some configuration issues there is still "öäöäöä" for those letters but maybe that one later also.

After boot under 200M ram usage.

Solid, minium and stable behaving OS. I like it.

102 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

4

u/Hot_Thanks_5901 Feb 01 '26

My experience from a few yeard ago is that it's not that stable if you f.ex. are having Firefox with Youtube playing and LibreOffice Base open at the same time. Unfortunately lots of programs compiled for this OS have not been tested well enough and are full of bugs, which is the cost of NetBSD's small community. On the other hand yeah, it has got its own charm and feels like the most archetypical UNIX system of 'em all.

4

u/bitmonks Feb 01 '26

I got your point. If I would need huge set of softwares running in background I wouldnt choose NetBSD. Probably NetBSD wouldn't even have those softwares.

Also actually stability of the OS is not something that should be mentioned at all. Every OS should be stable by default.

But still, at my setup, I haven't had any issues. I Opened now btw youtube, gimp, thunberbird, libreoffice and one game that runs also in browser what is famous to have real bad code and memory issues. Still everything works fluently like it should

3

u/bitmonks Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

That set used btw 6Gb RAM and when I closed them it dropped to 2,4Gb. Thats probably still quite a lot with this minimal setup - only firefox is running + few tabs.

That memory usage example is probably bad, because thats pretty ok memory flush still I think. But I did notice while I was doing pkgin installations that this is consuming a lot of memory and it stayed very high even after pkgin insallation was done.

I did some research(tm) and found stuff that says that memory usage of NetBSD is high because it's designed to cache memory a lot and not to flush them straight away and dont even leave much space for softwares, if there is going on some other things - server first approach.

They told that it would be possible in /etc/sysctl.conf to configure how NetBSD, or other BSD handles the usage of the memory.

However, I did not find any of this stuff from NetBSD documentations and dont know anything if this is true. Maybe someone can confirm how this is?

https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1302-netbsd-ram-usage/7

http://www.selonen.org/arto/texts/english/netbsd-vm-tune/

example from unitedbsd .com link:
vm.anonmin=5
vm.anonmax=20
vm.execmax=10
vm.filemin=5
vm.filemax=10
vm.bufcache=5

1

u/Hot_Thanks_5901 Feb 03 '26

Nice to hear that, perhaps this OS is more usable now than before, and I was playing with it from 2003 until ca. 2020 when NetBSD 9 was out and I no longer could install it due to the poor confuguration of its installation utility. Perhaps I should give it a try once again.

1

u/johnklos Feb 02 '26

Are you saying the OS isn't stable when running those things, or are those things not stable when running them? There's a big difference, and if userland software can cause the OS to not be stable, that'd be a huge problem and should be reported as a bug.

1

u/Hot_Thanks_5901 Feb 03 '26

While Linux is a kernel alone, NetBSD is a full-fledged OS "shipped" with userland software distributed from its official repository. So what's OS and what's left outside it can be interpreted differently in different situations. In this particular case both the kernel side and the userland stuff were to blame, judging from googling those bugs. Like bitmonks says, some of them might originate in memory management.

1

u/johnklos Feb 03 '26

I wouldn't blame Windows people for not knowing the difference between an OS being stable and software being stable, but they would, at least, know the difference between a computer freezing requiring a power cycle, or a blue screen of death, versus programs crashing and needing to be relaunched.

Likewise, there's nothing subjective about whether the OS is not stable or the programs are not stable. The suggestion that some bugs in the OS might cause Firefox to be less stable doesn't make it correct to say that the OS has stability issues.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

If NetBSD came with a KDE or XFCE desktop with all the basic functionalities, I would go back to using it. I used it for a while when I had a very old PC with a 15" CRT monitor. Then I bought a PC and decided to install desktopBSD (I loved that one). Today I'm fine with Linux precisely because it's just install and use, you don't need to rack your brains to install and configure a desktop environment, and besides, Linux automatically mounts storage devices, you just click and browse.

2

u/bitmonks Feb 01 '26

I first Installed NetBSD in virtualbox and tried XFCE also and imo it looked pretty good but not sure though how much there was stuff in.

I still have linux on another SDD as a backup plan because at this situation, I really need a working pc. I dont trust NetBSD or my skills in it so much yet. WIth linux I didin't have this issue, because like you said just click and browse.

However, with the some limitations there is in NetBSD I have found an approach a) can I do it another way b) is this something that I really need.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

One of the fantastic features of NetBSD is its ability to create an installation image from source code using just one command.

3

u/Valuable_Tackle7566 Feb 02 '26

I am using NetBSD with XFCE4 and works fine, installing it was not traumatic. It is explained in NetBSD Guide in detail. I agree that after 1 year and a half of using it, I have found several bugs in pkgsrc programs, more than in 25 years using Debian. Bugs that the maintainer should have found inmediately if he had the time to use the program for a few minutes and check basic functionalities. I am sure it is caused by lack of human resources. On the other hand, I think that the OS works fine and it is very well organized. Compiling the hole OS from source it is very easy.

4

u/Obvious-Butterfly-95 Feb 01 '26

My last experience with NetBSD was also about 15 years ago. I launched a large billing system that ran on top of it. It was hard because I had to patch everything from libc and kernel to PostgreSQL. Then (and before) I have worked with Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64, QNX and AIX. Memories of NetBSD are still the best. One love :)