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messeyesterday at 4:00 PM1 replyview on HN

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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spijdaryesterday at 4:09 PM

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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