After reading the web page, I am left with some questions unanswered,

* Is it a goal for AlpineBSD to run on native hardware, or is it intended for containers (a major use-case for Alpine itself)?

* For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

If the team want to attract interest, they should give more context.

The mission is unclear. The team could address this by stating goals and milestones on the front page.

There is a link to a tool s6 on the page. The description of that tool opens with a circular definition. It would be clearer if it stated why it exists in the opening paragraph. Near the bottom it talks about "One of the design goals of s6-frontend". It would be better to state all of the design goals.

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gabrielgio 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Alpine is really nice host OS for daily drive. Simple and small. Given that Drew is leading it my guess would be it is meant for native hardware.

> For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

Alpine userland is nice.

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RetroTechie 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Alpine userland is nice

NetBSD userland is not?

	▲	lproven 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> NetBSD userland is not? Honestly, no. I just reviewed version 11. It's a pain to install, a pain to configure, a pain to add a proper desktop, etc. If you do manage to install a desktop environment, the ones in the NetBSD repos are mostly long out of date. https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/netbsd-1... The community is great. The mailing list tried very hard to help me to install and run CDE. After 3 days of trying, I gave up. For reference, this was my 2nd or 3rd try. No, the NetBSD userland is not good, and the docs are not great either. There are an absolute tonne of implicit assumptions of knowledge that newcomers won't have. An example: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html The recommended way is "boot from install medium, install over the top". Note that the handbook does not actually say this, and goes on to detail an alternative method called "sysupgrade" which looks much like the OpenBSD method and resembles conventional Linux system upgrade methods. So I tried that. It irretrievably destroyed my only bare metal install. To forestall an inevitable comment: it's a testbed, so no, I did not have any backups. It contains -- well, contained -- no data at all.

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ibn_khaldun 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> * For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

To start a community.

	▲	yjftsjthsd-h 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But the NetBSD community already exists?