Honestly, no.
I just reviewed version 11. It's a pain to install, a pain to configure, a pain to add a proper desktop, etc. If you do manage to install a desktop environment, the ones in the NetBSD repos are mostly long out of date.
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/netbsd-1...
The community is great. The mailing list tried very hard to help me to install and run CDE.
After 3 days of trying, I gave up. For reference, this was my 2nd or 3rd try.
No, the NetBSD userland is not good, and the docs are not great either. There are an absolute tonne of implicit assumptions of knowledge that newcomers won't have.
An example:
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html
The recommended way is "boot from install medium, install over the top". Note that the handbook does not actually say this, and goes on to detail an alternative method called "sysupgrade" which looks much like the OpenBSD method and resembles conventional Linux system upgrade methods.
So I tried that. It irretrievably destroyed my only bare metal install.
To forestall an inevitable comment: it's a testbed, so no, I did not have any backups. It contains -- well, contained -- no data at all.
[–] rjsw 19 hours ago
Your "irretrievably destroyed" system was always recoverable.
[1] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2026/08/18/msg034...
[–] lproven 10 hours ago
Sighs deeply
OK, let me rephrase myself.
Most of the community is friendly and welcoming.
The advice was very well-intentioned but included things like the wrong names for commands and settings because that's how it used to be years ago, wrong port, missing commands, and comments along the lines of "oh, I never use pkgin, I just compile from source."
> Your "irretrievably destroyed" system was always recoverable.
It's a test install on a test box. It contains no data and nothing I need to retrieve. There is absolutely zero point in spending hours resetting permissions, rebuilding account databases, and trying to retrieve a test install.
As I keep saying, and the BSD folks always object... it's like Linux was ~30 years ago. Aside from 4Y working for SUSE, when my desktop and my laptop routinely self-destructed because Btrfs is a half-finished unreliable mess of a FS, I've never seen Linux self-destruct like that in decades.
Resurrecting a Linux box these days tends to mean running `fsck` and maybe reinstalling GRUB.
Just trying to update from 10.0 to 10.1 should not be this risky.
[–] rjsw 10 hours ago
[–] tosti 20 hours ago
The first time I installed netBSD was almost 20 years ago and it worked even back then, but it was rather limited. IIRC they were (one of) the first to have Xen, that was pretty cool imho.
[–] lproven 10 hours ago
Somethings I have routinely encountered in recent years, reviewing this stuff, are:
[1] When I report something that went wrong, xBSD users are very quick to castigate me, call me a liar, tell me I am incompetent, that things are fake news, etc.
[2] When I bother to chase things down, talk to the developers, etc. then they confirm that what I found was real, correct, and true -- but they never thought anybody would do that stuff.
It shocked the FreeBSD folks that VirtualBox defaults to BIOS firmware in 2025... and it labels UEFI as "experimental". What I said was correct: FreeBSD cannot readily boot from ZFS on MBR on a BIOS system. And no, it is not documented. They didn't think anyone would try, and they didn't know the defaults of the single most common cross-platform FOSS hypervisor.
Similarly, default CUA key bindings like Ctrl+left and Ctrl+right don't work and tend to emit garbage when used on the console. These are absolutely standard CUA defaults for the PC platform, but not in BSD. I don't know what it uses, maybe Vi keystrokes -- I learned that in 1988, hated it then, and never use it if I have a choice -- or Emacs. I refuse to use Emacs. I don't have a Meta key and neither does anyone on the Emacs dev team. Ain't got time for that 1970s nonsense.
My attitude is: run on the PC? Adopt PC standards or GTFO. This upsets BSD folks who think their '70s VAX standards or whatever are perfectly fine.
That's fine. I will continue pointing out the stuff that doesn't work until someone fixes it. I am sure there will be plenty of other stuff that doesn't work. It's not like there's a shortage.
Reading that chapter, it turns out that it does. Maybe it should stress the point more, but the actual doco is the likes of these:
* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/evbarm-aarch64...
* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/i386/INSTALL.h...
* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amd64/INSTALL....
* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amiga/INSTALL....
* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/sparc64/INSTAL...
… and so forth. Plus the manual pages for postinstall(8) and the like.