NetBSD 10 on a Pinebook Pro laptop

The Pinebooks are pretty neat and affordable bits of kit. I got the original Pinebook, and it came with a free upgrade from whichever display they originally said to a full 1080 resolution display. The limiting factor for the original is likely the single gigabyte of memory, but so long as I'm not running a popular browser, it's quick and the battery lasts forever (well, for easily more than six hours of constant use).

The article points out that there's good support in NetBSD for the hardware, which is good to know. Between the article and my own experience with various PINE64 hardware, aside from wifi (which is the bane of all open source OSes, apparently), everything works well, and PINE64 comes across as quite open and welcoming to all open source OSes, not just the popular ones. If I need a laptop with more memory, I'd definitely get a Pinebook Pro.

I love NetBSD. I used to dual boot it and OpenVMS on an old Alpha Server I rescued from my college IT department’s dumpster. Unfortunately I don’t have that machine anymore but it was a really fun toy.

NetBSD feels the most old school UNIXy and it’s a great way to keep old otherwise unusable machines alive.