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Comment by itomato | Hacker News Reader

NetBSD has beginners?

NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there. It's small, lean, and well documented. You could know almost nothing about nix, read their handbook, and come the other side half competent. Linux (my daily driver) by comparison is a constantly moving target with no single source for coherent documentation and where anything goes. FreeBSD is better, but when I last used the handbook it had plenty of outdated chapters, and it seemed like everything had so many different ways of doing things. NetBSD had small elegant solutions, and recompiling your entire system from scratch was a pleasant experience that didn't have me trapped in dependency hell or even needing to consult documentation after I got started.

> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.

I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.

FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.

Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.

And those who still use 32-bit machines, as Linux is in the process of killing support for them.

Oh no! What does that mean for using Wine to play games? From what I understand a lot of Windows games (especially older ones) require 32-bit Wine, which requires 32-bit libs (which I assume requires 32-bit Kernel support). It's the sole reason I run 64- and 32-bit multilib on my Arch box: playing Windows games.

Running 32-bit software isn't going away, just running a 32-bit kernel.

64 bit Linux can run 32 bit programs just like Windows. Modern Wine is using a WoW64 model where the 64 bit host code loads 32 bit DLLs when some app needs them.

Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.

That's not an empty set? I'm an eMacs guy, and I use vi when on the shell

I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.

I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.

Same here...

My favourite editor is mcedit, which you get by installing mc (midnight commander)

Like nano but (IMO) easier to use with a lot more features

It's funny because I learned enough vi to be useful specifically because of NetBSD forcing you to change "rc_configured=NO" to "rc_configured=YES" in rc.conf.

You can ask Claude to cross-complie, prepare an image (aka install) and run an emulator. I tried exactly this yesterday and in about an hour I could attach to tmux and run tests on emulated riscv64 board.

Careful, they might ban you!

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