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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

> NOTICE: The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux. You cannot necessarily expect AlpineBSD to work on any random computer you have lying around.

Huh. I feel like the author has their BSDs mixed up! NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything, even lots of platforms no longer supported by mainstream Linux distributions. The page links to the laptop wiki, which is about AMD64 laptops and their finicky peripherals and driver support. A better place to start for hardware support is https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/.

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> NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything

That means available number of architectures. NetBSD still support some pretty esoteric stuff, but though I haven't actually counted I would expect Linux to run on a comparable number of architectures.

Now, the kernel will probably boot successfully on a given machine, but whether hardware (i.e. driver) support will be decent enough for everyday use is a completely different matter! For example, NetBSD "works" on this laptop of mine... except for Ethernet card, Wi-Fi card, touchpad, ACPI suspension, external monitors via the docking station, ... :)

I'm trying (for fun) to bridge some of these gaps, but you can see how this isn't appealing to the average user.

If those are Elantech or Synaptics touchpads, then this is the bug report to get behind:

* https://gnats.netbsd.org/60897

I think that it is specifically the interaction between ihidev and ACPI. The hardware devices themselves are PS/2, with a vendor-specific extension to PS/2 activated by a special handshake, plus I2C. (On machines from 2024 that come with 9 USB root hubs; such is the inertia of laptop design.)

My scant research on the touchpad situation tells me that this laptop (TUXEDO InfinityBook 14 Pro) is likely a repackaged UNIWILL IDL (https://www.uniwill.com.tw/?page_id=16918). On Linux, the touchpad is probably handled by the i2c_hid module and I think OpenBSD has sys/dev/i2c/imt.c that might handle it (NetBSD has sys/dev/i2c/ims.c, but no sys/dev/i2c/imt.c).

The impression I get is that NetBSD has just enough code to get it up and running on a machine but there is not enough development and testing to get it to run well on a machine.

As a NetBSD developer, I wouldn't claim that it works on everything.

"runs on practically everything" I take to mean the main CPU and general machine architecture, not every possible peripheral driver one might need.

yeah. it'll boot. want wifi? you need a virtual machine running linux to contain the driver lol

That, to be fair, was FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD Foundation has spent a lot of money in the last couple of years on improving Wifi, drivers, power management, etc. in what it terms the "laptop project".

Depends on what you mean with "it runs". Does it boot? Probably. Can you use your WiFi adapter or graphics card? Probably not

That was true 20 years ago, but not really today. Today's hardware is much more complicated and I wouldn't expect NetBSD to work well on anything but the most basic hardware.

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