NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.
The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:
“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”
It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions.
Has anyone used a *BSD lately? Genuine question. I have tried one of them in the past and it wasn’t really something that you can use as a daily driver. Have they improved? If so, I wouldn’t mind taking another dive.
I gave it a try in a VM , because I do that kinda thing for fun.
I couldn’t figure out the DE install, but I really didn’t try nor do any research.
Compared to my experience with arch or fedora, it’s not something to half ass on a whim.
FreeBSD is actually quite easy when you know Arch from before the introduction of systemd. It also has a massive documentation.
Well damn then.
It was pretty easy for me to run KDE on freebsd following these steps. I’m running it in a VM, mostly just to become familiar with it, so there’s probably a lot I don’t have to fuss with.
It’s basically just install sddm and KDE then enable them in sysrc.