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▲ gabrielgio 5 hours ago

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.

▲RetroTechie 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Alpine userland is nice

NetBSD userland is not?

▲lproven an hour 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 If you do manage to install a desktop environment, the ones in the NetBSD repos are mostly long out of date.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.