Post #2306627
2026-04-25 23:26 UTC
Replies (2)
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@tfb@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-26 06:55
@jrsharp@mastodon.sdf.org @TomAoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe That's fair enough, and I have systems where I carefully select lighter-weight software. But my main NetBSD machine is perfectly capable of running Gimp, Firefox, etc. It's frustrating to see a future coming where much mainstream FOSS applications are used to try to enforce a switch to Wayland.
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@TomAoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-26 10:09
@jrsharp@mastodon.sdf.org @tfb@mastodon.bsd.cafe IIUC (never actually tried yet, though, as I'm on FreeBSD), NetBSD is good at separating MI / MD parts of archs / drivers, right? If so, it would be easier for NetBSD to keep many archs / drivers for already-not-manufactured devices compared with others. AFAIK, FreeBSD kept on focusing on "actual usabilities for limited archs in the wild", thus, keeping outdated hardware / arch supports to be difficult within limited resources. Most 32bit archs including i386 is dropped to Tier2 (still supported, though) and some were already removed from all supported releases. Only armv7 is kept as Tier2 for all supported releases among other 32bit archs as of quite strong objections from actual devs. (Why i386 is dropped to Tier2 and removed at 15.0 is that it alone uses 32bit time_t and switching it to 64bit makes native i386 support meaningless as of fatal backward compatibility issue.) Luckily, armv7 had 64bit time_t from its beginning (or from quite early phase on porting to it), thus, allowed to kept as Tier2. https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ Note that i386 binaries can still run on amd64 (aka x86_64 or x64) via compat32 feature, but not sure it can survive 32bit time_t epoch or not.