sometimes i miss simpler days. this is a fresh install of netbsd in a vm. /sbin/init is 36K. there is no desktop environment beyond vanilla x11 with ctwm. by all appearances, this could pass for #retrocomputing.
Have you ever noticed that there are certain directories everyone has? ~/Documents, ~/Downloads, ~/Desktop, and so forth? Some of them you don't need, some of them you might wish were named differently, but any time you rename or delete them, the originals reappear?
You see, these directories follow a standard so that all programs know where they are—with the right tools under your belt, you can customize them.
It's a neat little OS. Kinda halfway between #NetBSD and #OpenBSD's razor focus and minimalism, and #Linux's sprawling feature set and bloat.
It's a stupid rubric, but I always judge a system by mount |wc -l (taking into account if there are many actual volumes mounted). If there's more than 10 non-disk volumes by default, that's kind of silly.
#NetBSD: a more traditional unix, very focused goals (similar to #OpenBSD), broad architecture support #FreeBSD: more geared towards the enterprise, more feature-complete (bhyve virtualization, linux executable compatibility, ZFS), a little better hardware compatibility on the one PC (Thinkpad) I tried both of them on.
To be fair, I spent very little time on NetBSD (only because I couldn't get suspend to work).
I spent the weekend refreshing the BSD cloud images on https://bsd-cloud-image.org/. This may be a good resource for your if you're curious about the #BSD OS and you would like to quickly spawn a bunch of VM.
These unofficial images are tested with #OpenStack and Virt-Lightning (libvirt on Linux) but they should work with any cloud.
@swagpussc The basic thing to understand is that this is not a world of Windows.
There have always been other operating systems, and in particular there has been, since the late 1960s, a large class of operating systems that are: Unix; one of the many flavours of Unix that #Unix split into in the 1970s; or someone creating an operating system that's very much like Unix, from the ground up, a decade or 2 later.
#Linux is (the kernel of) the last sort of operating system.
They're the full operating system "nut", both "kernel" and "shell", in one and can trace their lineages, complete with long version control histories going back decades, to old #Unix flavours of the 1970s.
They're not the same as one another.
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