this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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libre

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Welcome to libre

A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.

The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.

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founded 5 years ago
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Drew and friends recently began working on a new distribution based on the NetBSD kernel. Watch this space.

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[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's cool. I was just wondering why use this over just NetBSD. I am assuming they are the BSD that don't take LLM generated contributions.

[–] uokgerku@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Tbh..... imo I think it's the only BSD appropriate for this kinda project rn

OpenBSD is dominated by the dictatorship of that South African-Canadian chud, Theo de Raadt, who is almost singularly focused on "security" (a word which means many things to the OpenBSD project from good configurations defaults to uhhhh exploit mitigation techniques which have questionable utility at best). Their kernel is pretty much intended for them and only them and while they're changing shit out from under you if u complain about it on the mailing list Theo will probably call u an entitled [slur]. To be clear, I love OpenBSD, its my favorite Unix, and Google just ripped their libc for Android years back (Bionic) so its not unprecedented but I prolly wouldn't try to fork or base smth on their kernel unless I had development resources exceeding OpenBSD's team

FreeBSD is the Linux of the BSDs :3 (derogatory). Its codebase is massive, its code quality is sometimes worse than even Linux (see that incident a few yrs ago when some landlord wrote an in-kernel Wireguard implementation for them), and the development staff, at least to me >w<, seems overworked and too focused on features to implement things like basic exploit mitigation technology (it took them until fuckin 2021 to enable ASLR by default, not to mention that embarrassing incident some years ago when some security researcher started looking into the FreeBSD codebase and reporting serious security bugs that didn't even get a reply from the FreeBSD security team (to be fair, that was a long time ago))

I think prolly NetBSD is the only project that has ppl that might be open to working with an effort like this, has a codebase amenable to this kind of thing and which doesn't have part of itself ripped out every other year by ppl going over the code constantly with a chainsaw (OpenBSD) or have some userspace-breaking security change forced into it also every other year, and aren't too busy accepting commits from Netflix and Facebook to work on improving the codebase they already have

All of this is besides the project's positions on LLMs which I'm not very familiar with

[–] transbyanism@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I am a long time linux user and system administrator, working in the dreadful field of devops. Would you say its worth learning OpenBSD? I've recently setup a server with it, and I'm really enjoying the amazing manpages and everything else, but now I'm second guessing based on what you said in this thread haha. But I had no idea about the chud politics of the lead dev, which isnt exactly surprising knowing how FOSS spaces are nowadays lol. What would be the best BSD in your opinion (for server and for desktop)? Also ouch I didnt know FreeBSD was that bad.

I've been using Arch Linux for the past years as context. Didnt know there is a BSD knower here so I'm eager to hear more, thank you! :3