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.
@cenzorrll@piefed.ca is probably right. Again, my expression isn’t “it’s impossible” it’s “you need to pay attention to achieve it”.
I just slop a random distro into a VM once in a while for the lulz. The only thing it indicates is “how idiot proof is installing this OS?”.
The result of the experiment is that FreeBSD is not idiot proof. I got it to install, but I didn’t get to install a DE (LXQT) from the bare bones install. I probably can , I just need to actually pay some attention and read some guides.
The other thing is that I’m installing it into an already weak machine, so putting fancier DEs like GNOME or KDE aren’t going to work out too good.
LXQT is “official” for FreeBSD
https://lxqt-project.org/
https://wiki.freebsd.org/LXQt