I tried NetBSD as a desktop, and it felt like stepping into the ’90s in a good way

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While Linux gets most of the attention of open-source fans, I’ve also long had a soft spot for the BSDs as a former Mac user. While FreeBSD is serviceable as a desktop OS, I wanted to find out how well its rival, NetBSD, could serve as a desktop.

What is NetBSD?

Of course it runs NetBSD

While Linux systems are described as “Unix-like,” modern BSD systems, including NetBSD, can trace their lineage to the original Unix system first developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1960s. An article in the influential computer science journal Communications of the ACM brought Unix to the wider attention of the academic computer science community.

Because Bell Labs’ parent company, AT&T, was legally barred from entering industries other than phone service under a consent decree, Bell Labs licensed Unix to universities for a nominal cost. This license included the source code. One of the universities that got hold of Unix was UC Berkeley. Graduate students, particularly future Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, set to work modifying the system and adding new tools, among them Vi, the basis for the modern Vim editor.

This modified version of Unix became known as the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. During the 1980s, BSD became the basis for workstation versions of Unix, including on Sun’s workstation line. BSD predated Linux and GNU as open-source operating systems, though parts were initially…

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