gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systems
Oct 14, 2026, 4:41 PMi am burning the netbsd image to the usb stick to try it on real hardware
Replies
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:24 PM
well, i have netbsd installed to an external drive and i can run firefox, albeit without acceleration.
i am thinking the existing package manager is a bit... basic. however i also happened to notice chez scheme is in the netbsd repos, so i could just write one in idris.
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:31 PM
i think a desktop-focused netbsd distribution (not that i'm committing to such a thing of course) could probably use a new installer too.
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:32 PM
aaand i guess i will have to recompile my kernel to try out amdgpu. so totally not a baptism of fire.
Hey Guselebertus@eigenmagic.netOct 14, 2026, 4:58 PM@dysfun what are your plans for de/wm stuffs?
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:21 PM
@elebertus nfc tbh, graphics remains the hard part. it comes with ctwm (a twm fork by the looks) out of the box and that won't do.
time to play with wayland compositors i guess
- Hey Guselebertus@eigenmagic.netOct 14, 2026, 5:36 PM
@dysfun yeah xfce4 I think is ootb available (was reading this morning). I assume i3 also works or there is a source package for it.
Tbh I know so little about how *bsd is different than linux I'm not even sure
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:38 PM
@elebertus mmm, i mean people just tend to do linux only things and so some porting is typically required. POSIX by itself isn't very useful.
i think i read xfce is slopping it up these days?
- Hey Guselebertus@eigenmagic.netOct 14, 2026, 6:40 PM
@dysfun yeah I think the policy is attribution. I cbf to check the commit history for all the things but if your policy is no slop anywhere xfce is sadly excluded by that.
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 6:43 PM
@elebertus literally the entire point here is avoiding slop, or i'd just continue using alpine.
- Hey Guselebertus@eigenmagic.netOct 14, 2026, 6:44 PM
@dysfun yup I follow. Also i3 is out and if you are futzing w wayland probably sway too.
Fucking hell man
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 6:45 PM
@elebertus yeah i'm less worried about this than graphics tbh
Joe GroffjoeOct 14, 2026, 5:32 PM@dysfun my dream os rn would be something like Haiku in the front, NetBSD in the back
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:35 PM
@joe see what i wanted was SeL4, but it's not really had much love on the desktop and i'd have to be really dedicated to make it work. which i'm not, really.
i am gonna guess that haiku isn't all separated out so you could just easily port it to netbsd - it's binary compatible with BeOS, after all
- Joe GroffjoeOct 14, 2026, 5:39 PM
@dysfun netbsd does have a number of binary compatibility layers, and most of the beos/haiku kernel secret sauce (FS notifications, multithreading, fast IPC) is more mainstream than it was in 1999, so it's tempting to try to do a haiku syscall layer for another kernel.
- Joe GroffjoeOct 14, 2026, 5:40 PM
@dysfun if someone was really going for that level of effort though, it does seem like it'd be better directed in the capabilities-over-microkernel direction than any of the traditional style oses. haiku on redox when
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:43 PM
@joe the problem with redox is i worry about hardware support. by my estimation, netbsd is the absolute lowest amount of hardware support that the average person will put up with.
no that's a lie, it's already worse than the average person will put up with.
- Joe GroffjoeOct 14, 2026, 5:45 PM
@dysfun we simply need to make sure a five-year-old thinkpad is available to everyone who wants one
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:46 PM
@joe that's apparently no guarantee of anything. my graphics card is like a decade old now and apparently when i've finished recompiling my kernel i can look forward to issues.
- Joe GroffjoeOct 14, 2026, 5:47 PM
@dysfun but yeah it sucks because Linux pretty much just works on anything PC-shaped these days, even FreeBSD struggles by comparison, and everything else is nowhere close
another idle fancy project i had in mind was an nLite-style hack to pare first party Windows/OS X installs down to the bare minimum needed to host a hypervisor that can provide an easy-to-support HAL for alternative OSes to run under
algernon.stzardoz@ioc.exchangeOct 14, 2026, 5:48 PM- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 6:04 PM
@joe just found this yikes! on redox https://mastodon.minionflo.net/@tranquillity/117439671982595073
- gaytabasedysfun@treehouse.systemsOct 14, 2026, 5:41 PM
@joe as the unwise person who looks set to try and drag netbsd to the modern desktop, maybe you should 😂