I just replaced  Gentoo GNU/Linux  with NetBSD  on my mobile
lab's laptops. An OS focused on portability is a great idea.
The install  is very gentle  and more friendly-seeming  than
OpenBSD's. It wasn't obvious to me initially that networking
defaults  would get set up by configuring  the network   for
downloading   sets via ftp (if this is your normal  network,
would you like to have this written  to /etc to enable it on
boot?). 

*I think I've seen that nm03 uses NetBSD sometimes.

I  think  everything  works so well and  instantly   because
NetBSD focuses on portability,  in contrast to OpenBSD which
strives for correctness.   OpenBSD  consistently  died a few
seconds after booting after a successful  install on some of
the  same laptops,  I speculate  probably  because  of  late
arriving  weird firmware  signals  such as those about power
saving modes. The many firmware 'features' are truly bad and
generally   discontinued,  so they are kind of accidents  of
history  I believe.  I should look into that more / actually
tell the openbsd  people  about it, but this phlog  is about
NetBSD. 

Netbsd  has a binary package  utility/package  source called
pkgin  that seems  a little  bit like Debian's  apt.  (pkgin
search emacs, pkgin install  emacs). I notice that the emacs
is emacs 26, so kind of a blast from the past.   I guess  it
was a good call not moving to emacs 27, because  of some  of
the lousy problems that appeared there. 

The display manager can be enabled by default during install
(xdm?  I forgot  now.),  the default window  manager  is cwm
which  seems fine.  I don't  know how to customise  keyboard
accelerators  for it yet though.  Left click -> terminal  ->
start app from there is what I am doing so far. 

I don't understand  NetBSD's  frameworks yet.  There doesn't
seem to be a way to get sndio on it for audio.   Instead  of
OpenBSD httpd, NetBSD has tiny and super-light  bozohttpd. I
think this is probably actually good for fiddling  around in
some sense, but it stresses me out not having OpenBSD's easy
casual security norms. 

sbcl  works  easy  because  the portability   focus  doesn't
include OpenBSD's  paranoia against wxallowed,  I guess.  So
you  can  (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die  "foo.sbcl")   and  sbcl
--core foo.sbcl happily on your /home mount.  Obviously  the
partitions  and mounts aren't openbsd's. There are basically
none of the mitigations  I'm used to.  No unveil  or pledge.
Easy access  to sbcl means super high lispy speed (sbcl is a
top 10 fast program compiler),  though I still like my Kyoto
lisp descendant  ECL's C sffi norms (which is also in NetBSD
ports). 

This  is  actually   good, in that netbsd   achieves   great
portability  and working-out-of-the-box-ivity.  It's so much
nicer than the usual linuxens  on that front.  The trade off
for  the portability  is that you need to think  more  about
your personal  security  and not taking risks.  There's   no
jailkit either actually. 

So I love that installing  is a friendly and relaxing breeze
and the defaults all resilient  against terrible and obscure
firmware   from  a  decade  ago, but the lack  of  OpenBSD's
security   norms/mitigations   stresses  me  out.   I  would
definitely   recommend   this  over  the   beginner-catching
GNU/linux distributions for ease of use and sane portability
focused defaults. 

I guess not being GNU is kind of a drawback,  but it's  just
not  the 80s any more,  and linux  hasn't  been pro-GNU  for
decades  at this point.  There  isn't  an analogy  to Gentoo
GNU/linux's @FREE license set USE, eg. 

Now, can I easily  build jns' eternity  under netbsd  is the
question or do I need to fall back to Gentoo.