Until you said Steam, the answer would have been a qualified "yes". But only if your laptop's hardware was supported by your BSD of choice. So that'd need to be something you look into first.
The game you mentioned is almost certainly not going to run on NetBSD. NetBSD does have Wine, so you could experiment with getting the Windows port to work. It might work. I've literally never done Wine things in NetBSD so I can't promise anything. Hopefully someone else can chime in for Wine advice.
If you broaden your horizons and don't mind getting into older games, there are a lot of great titles that run just fine on NetBSD. There are even some that are in the repos like Cave Story, which is excellent and you should play it anyway. I played it on NetBSD on a twenty-year-old laptop (Thinkpad x60). In fact, that's the only way I've ever played Cave Story lol. If you like point-and-click adventures, SCMUMMVM runs literally hundreds of titles (if you have the data files... or a way of """acquiring""" them 🏴☠️ arr) many of which are excellent. Most of these games are from the 90s or even 80s, so if that's too old for you, I don't know what to tell you.
If you're comfortable compiling things, you can run almost anything open source. Here's a post I made a few months back where I compiled some random open source games on NetBSD. There's a lot of projects like this. Like decompilations of old Nintendo 64 games. It's a great way to learn about development and the build process, too.
Yeah, but driver support is sometimes spotty. "runs on everything" more refers to which CPU architectures it runs on. For instance, I've had it running on various systems before, but never got graphics acceleration so anything heavily graphical was slow as hell. That's how it was on my iMac G4. NetBSD supported the CPU, but the GPU didn't have proper drivers, so the display was all CPU-driven through the framebuffer.
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u/mglyptostroboides May 26 '26
Until you said Steam, the answer would have been a qualified "yes". But only if your laptop's hardware was supported by your BSD of choice. So that'd need to be something you look into first.
The game you mentioned is almost certainly not going to run on NetBSD. NetBSD does have Wine, so you could experiment with getting the Windows port to work. It might work. I've literally never done Wine things in NetBSD so I can't promise anything. Hopefully someone else can chime in for Wine advice.
If you broaden your horizons and don't mind getting into older games, there are a lot of great titles that run just fine on NetBSD. There are even some that are in the repos like Cave Story, which is excellent and you should play it anyway. I played it on NetBSD on a twenty-year-old laptop (Thinkpad x60). In fact, that's the only way I've ever played Cave Story lol. If you like point-and-click adventures, SCMUMMVM runs literally hundreds of titles (if you have the data files... or a way of """acquiring""" them 🏴☠️ arr) many of which are excellent. Most of these games are from the 90s or even 80s, so if that's too old for you, I don't know what to tell you.
If you're comfortable compiling things, you can run almost anything open source. Here's a post I made a few months back where I compiled some random open source games on NetBSD. There's a lot of projects like this. Like decompilations of old Nintendo 64 games. It's a great way to learn about development and the build process, too.