Post #1903362

2026-05-03 04:32 UTC

The NetBSD VM experiment continues. Currently building WebKitGtk60 using pkgsrc-wip to see if I can continue developing Sunstone if and when I make the switch for real. Overall I have to say NetBSD has come a long way from what I remember. In years past it really felt like it had lagged behind eg. FreeBSD. I'm not getting that impression now. The installer is really straightforward, you get X11 as part of the install, and Pkgin works just like you would expect a modern package manager to work on Linux. It's a little slower than Pacman from what I can tell, but it's in a VM so hard to say for sure. It was also nice to see that zfs runs on NetBSD now.

Replies (1)

@jeang3nie@social.linux.pizza 2026-05-03 04:47

There are a couple things that might bother me setting up NetBSD as a server compared with other options. FreeBSD has Capsicum and Jails, while OpenBSD has Pledge/Unveil. And obviously Linux has process namespaces, making containers possible. In any event, all of the other options have given serious consideration to isolation and/or sandboxing via various means. There is also a huge difference between what is installable via pkgsrc when compared with FreeBSD ports (or your typical Linux distribution, for that matter). It's probably enough for my needs, but you miss out on the majority of the modern Gnome and KDE Plasma ecosystems (Gnome packages in pkgsrc are stuck anywhere from version 3.36 to 40, meanwhile you can install KDE4). I can see myself getting involved in packaging if I follow through with this migration, because it's pretty obvious there is a need.

Open ##1903945