whoami

NetBSD, from their own website:

The NetBSD Project's goals

A project has no point if it doesn't have goals. Thankfully, the NetBSD Project has enough goals to keep it busy for quite some time. Generally speaking, the NetBSD Project:

provides a well designed, stable, and fast BSD system,
avoids encumbering licenses,
provides a portable system, which runs on many hardware platforms,
interoperates well with other systems,
conforms to open systems standards as much as is practical.

In summary: The NetBSD Project provides a freely available and redistributable system that professionals, hobbyists, and researchers can use in whatever manner they wish.

Based on the name of have assumed it’s be used in things like network appliances but in 20 years I’ve never seen a single device use it.

The name comes from being develop over the internet, when that was still a pretty new concept. It's pretty popular among Japanese ISP's iirc.

If you're at all interested in unix, you should try NetBSD. Open has security as a focus...although some of that is overstated imo. FreeBSD is clearly targeting servers, even if it is all purpose.

NetBSD is less popular, but it's clean, lightweight, portable, has pkgsrc. Think of Net as a cross between Open and Free.

Artsakh is Armenia.

I hope someone can step in and help Armenia from Azeri aggression, but I'm not hopeful

because of its social contract, its free software guidelines, and the community around it

use linux/bsd

the thing it offers is no systemd, and the mx-linux gui tools to configure your system. Also the advanced hardware support (AHS) is a neat feature. They basically take Debian and make it slightly more user friendly. It's just less well known than something like ubuntu or mint.

No it's not widely used. But I think it has a small loyal community. Some people really love it. I've only tried it a couple of times, and only on virtual machines. I liked doing admin via text files, and I like that using the "kitchen sink" option you basically have a tool for every task after install. It's linux but sort unixy or bsd-like in how it approaches some things. That works for some and not so much for others. I might try it out again, but most likely I will stick to Debian.

If you want more software it's up to you how to do it. With 3rd party tools like sbopkg it's easier than before, and with tools like flatpak install other software is even easier.

There is also slackware current, and all the other repos, like the work alienbob does to provide plasma desktop etc.

I like it, for the most part. Obviously you need to check to see if your hardware is supported, but it's a good OS. It's stable, has neat features like boot environments, and it with pkg and the ports tree you can have newer versions of software. Also, they don't make changes to the OS for the sake of it, or because one person or group wants it. They make change with a clear plan in my mind. Sometimes that means features land later in FreeBSD, but they're implemented more thoughtfully imo.

OpenBSD and NetBSD are also cool projects in their own right.

since you're used to debian, maybe try something that isn't debian based.

PCLinuxOS

Mageia

Slackware

OpenSuse

Free/open/netbsd

they're pretty great imo

that's what I was thinking of....I knew they had used someone elses VPN just couldn't remember which one

awesome thanks

would have to check on that specifically.