A 2005 Love Letter to NetBSD Still Resonates With Portability Fans
A post from the NetBSD advocacy mailing list, originally written in 2005, has been making the rounds again. In it, a longtime user reflects on how NetBSD shaped their approach to computing, praising its famous portability, minimalism, and the discipline of its codebase compared to flashier alternatives at the time.
The piece is less a technical deep-dive and more a personal essay: the author describes running NetBSD on obscure hardware, learning Unix internals by reading its source, and finding a sense of community in a project that never chased mainstream popularity.
While the post itself is two decades old, it still gets shared because NetBSD's philosophy - "of course it runs NetBSD" - remains a touchstone for developers who value portability and clean design over market share.