That's a very limited view of what portability means.

Driver support for a niche SoC? Good luck getting NetBSD on before Linux. The sheer amount of SoCs supported by the Linux kernel dwarfs anything NetBSD has to offer.

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spijdar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.

Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?

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hulitu 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think Linux "just works" on VAX, Sun4/75, or Alpha.

My experience with Linux on a Sun Sparcstation 20 circa 2000 was that it was slow as hell compared to Net or OpenBSD.

	▲	messe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt NetBSD "just works" fully on those systems either. I see a lot of rose tinted glasses when NetBSD portability comes up. Those older systems barely get stress tested, as the system has become too large to be self-hosted on them anymore and has to resort to using cross compilation to build a working base. At least OpenBSD, when it says it supports a platform, _actually supports that platform_, and the system is stable enough that it can build itself.