Fifteen years of NetBSD

Fifteen years of NetBSD

You say Linux supports 22 architectures, plus some other half-baked ports. The list of platforms that NetBSD supports contains 56 architectures. Seems like NetBSD is still the most portable operating system in the world.

I think the victory of Linux in embedded space is due to the fact that Linux is not an operating system; it is a modular monolithic kernel that can be squeezed into very tiny Flash ROMs along with a small C library like Diet libC and your custom program. What NetBSD provides -- a kernel, bootloader, C library, /bin utilities, compilers, headers, init(8) scripts, manpages, etc., etc., -- is overkill for most embedded applications.

A better fit for NetBSD is older, obscure hardware such as a Sun SparcStation, Amiga, BeBox, NeXT cube, etc. These are complete computers that have enough resources to run a complete operating system.

FreeBSD is a better fit for servers due to it's SMP performance. If performance is not critical, then OpenBSD is also good for servers due to it's focus on security.

I feel that Linux is best for desktops because of it's rapid development cycle and wide range of hardware support. These qualities, which make it great for running the latest-and-greatest video card or motherboard chipset, make it a poor choice for servers where stability and backwards compatibility is the most important factor. Yes, there are distributions like RHEL and SLES that try to stabilize the kernel and all the various GNU bits that make up a distribution, but it's far better to use a complete operating system like FreeBSD or Solaris that are designed for servers and are developed under stricter engineering standards (e.g. a separate stable branch and development branch, release documentation, defect tracking system, etc).

AFAIK, the Linux count is CPU architectures, whereas the BSD count is complete machine
architectures, NetBSD covers 15 CPU architectures (By my count from NetBSD's own list).

Correct.  The NetBSD count includes things like Amiga and Atari as separate "architectures"
(both use m68k processors), while the Linux count would identify this as a single m68k
"architecture".

Any decent "stable" Linux distribution nowadays that doesn't have "separate stable branch and
development branch, release documentation, defect tracking system"?

Anyway, Debian as a complete operating system comes pretty close.
http://www.us.debian.org/ports/


But the Debian system includes much more than the base system (that needs to be buildable on
all supported platforms).