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I, too, loved the old logo. Not being of a nationality that has been involved in the pacific war though had kept the iwo jima reference hidden to me. They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects. The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well. The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird. Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS. |
I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system.
I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years.
I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431