Verdict: NetBSD
Old hardware, patience, and a suspicion that portability is a virtue. NetBSD runs on machines other systems dropped decades ago and on machines other systems never heard of. VAX, m68k, SPARC, Alpha, PPC, ARM, MIPS, even your toaster if it has an MMU and enough RAM. The slogan is “Of course it runs NetBSD,” and it is not a joke. It is a design constraint and a promise.
What you get
Section titled “What you get”- Support for dozens of architectures. PDP-11? NetBSD. Your grandfather’s Alpha workstation? NetBSD. That Amiga you found? NetBSD. This is not marketing. NetBSD actually runs on all of this.
- A clean, readable codebase written by people who value education. If you want to learn how an OS actually fits together, this is the source tree to read. No magic. No shortcuts. No premature optimization.
pkgsrc, a package system so portable that other operating systems import it and use it. Linux users run NetBSD’s package manager because it is that good.- A system that treats a 20-year-old machine as a supported platform, not a museum piece. Your 2003 laptop is still a first-class citizen.
What will hurt
Section titled “What will hurt”- The community is small. If you hit a weird problem on obscure hardware, the answer might be “you are the first person to hit this.” You might have to fix it yourself. That is the deal.
- Desktop polish is not the point. You will configure things by hand and you will like it. No GUI installers for every little thing.
- Modern laptop and GPU support trails the big projects. Suspend/resume might not work. Modern Nvidia cards might not work. This is the trade for supporting everything old.
- Package updates are less frequent. The release cycle is slower because testing on 20 architectures takes time.
Getting help
Section titled “Getting help”- NetBSD Documentation - comprehensive and well-maintained.
- NetBSD Mailing Lists - port-@ for your architecture, questions@ for general.
- IRC: irc.libera.chat, #netbsd channel.
- The source code itself. If documentation is sparse, the code is usually the clearest explanation.
First steps
Section titled “First steps”- Pick your architecture. Most machines are amd64 or aarch64 now. But you have options.
- Don’t expect a graphical installer on all platforms. Some require command line install. That is OK.
- pkgsrc is powerful but different from apt/dnf/pacman. Read the pkgsrc guide.
- X11 and window managers are available but optional. You can run NetBSD headless just fine.
- Set expectations. This is not a desktop OS first. It is a capable, portable, honest OS.
Where to start
Section titled “Where to start”Download from netbsd.org, read the install guide, grab that machine someone called scrap, and give it a second career. You might be surprised how well a 15-year-old machine can run.