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[cropped-cropped-eerie_logo3-2]

Installing *BSD in 2025 part 3 - A critical look at
NetBSD's installer

May 31, 2025May 31, 2025 ~ kraileth

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.]

This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is
here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2025/
installing_bsd_pt3.gmi

The first part of this series was about FreeBSD's installer and the
second covered OpenBSD's installation program.

This is a longer article and it has the most images that I ever
included in one. While writing the other two articles didn't take me
too long, this one has has occupied several evenings / nights over
the course of about three weeks.

NetBSD is an OS that I installed only a couple of times over the
years, so I'm not very familiar with its installer, sysinst. This
fact was actually what led to this article (or the whole series
rather): Talking to a NetBSD developer at EuroBSDcon 2023, I
mentioned my impression that NetBSD was harder to install than it
needed to be. He was interested in my perspective as a relative
newcomer, and so I promised to take a closer look and write about it.
While it certainly took me long enough, I finally get to do this. So
let's take a look at NetBSD's installer, shall we? The version
explored here is NetBSD 10.1 on amd64.

Installing a simple graphical NetBSD system

Sysinst is menu-driven like FreeBSD's installer, but the two are
quite different. This is not a direct comparison, but I'm going to
mention other installers where appropriate. Like in the previous two
articles, I'm going to install the OS twice: One time using the
standard VGA console and once to assess how well it works over
serial. Both installations will be in VMs just for the sake of
convenience.

Language settings

The first screen that the installer presents is the language
selection. If you're used to more mainstream operating systems, you
may be surprised that there's only four languages in addition to
English. But hey: Many other installers are available in English
only, and if you're somebody who's more comfortable with German,
(Castilian) Spanish, French, or Polish than with English, it's nice
to have the option!

I like that there's a short introduction text at the top which
briefly explains how to navigate the installer. This is very nice for
newcomers! Assigning each item an alphabetic hotkey is also a great
mechanic that makes navigating the installer a breeze even if there's
a lot of options (FreeBSD's choice of numeric hotkeys is obviously
inferior as soon as there are more than ten items).

[eerie829]Language selection

After selecting the language, the installer presents a list of
supported keyboard layouts. Again, NetBSD's installer does not offer
the most comprehensive list ever, but there are some surprises. Given
the relatively short list, your preferred keymap may not be
available.

You probably wouldn't expect that somebody invested the effort to
make Icelandic available, would you? And there's also things like
"German (NEO2)", a relatively obscure ergonomic variant (that I've
actually used in the past before adopting BONE whith is basically
NEO3). Not even FreeBSD offers NEO2, BTW. Those unusual cases are
strong indicators of the NetBSD project being happy to include
contributions. So if you consider making a keymap for your layout,
another option in the list could probably be yours!

[eerie830]Keyboard layout selection

Next is the main menu that allows the user to either install a fresh
system, upgrade an existing one, reboot and so on. Like in the menu
before, the text at the top did not change. But it didn't have to
since once again the menu options are self-explanatory.

[eerie831]Installer options

The next screen presents some information on the steps of the
installation process and asks if that is what the user wants to do.
It's concise and to the point - I like it. It means an additional key
press, but it's helpful for newcomers.

[eerie832]Installation process overview

Preparing the hard disk

Now sysinst needs to know the installation target. I believe a more
detailed explanation at the top would be beneficial. It's probably
nitpicking to point out that "Extended partitioning" is not exactly
an answer to the question "On which disk do you want to install
NetBSD?". That aside, I genuinely believe this screen could be
improved. Something like "Select a single disk as the installation
target or choose 'extended partitioning' for softraid, a logical
volume manager or device encryption." would be better. Probably
mentioning that 'wd*' means IDE or SATA drives, 'sd*' is for SCSI or
external USB drives and 'ld*' are logical drives like VirtIO drives
and NVME could be helpful as well.

[eerie833]Installation target selection

The next screen does not have any explanatory text at all - another
missed opportunity. While people who install NetBSD probably know it,
would it hurt to mention that MBR is the scheme that older BIOS
systems expect while GPT is required for EFI systems? I guess it
wouldn't.

[eerie834]Partitioning scheme selection

The partition options and the description text for GPT are fine.

[eerie835]Partitioning options

The default partition layout makes sense: One big partition for /,
another for swap and a tmpfs-backed one for /tmp - and of course the
FAT partition that is required for EFI booting. Since splitting out /
usr and /var is common, both are suggested but have a size of 0, so
they won't be used unless the proposed layout is edited.

In general the top text is fine. While the explanation of the plus
sign is helpful, I would appreciate a hint on how to select the
partition that receives the plus. It took me quite a while to find
out that when defining a partition size it can simply be appended!
This was not immediately obvious to me.

[eerie836]Partition sizes and file systems

Editing partition sizes is easy enough. However the fact that giving
/usr a size that is not 0 by default moves the plus sign to it even
if *not* added to the size entered is quite confusing. It makes the
plus mechanic appear magic even though it really isn't. To be honest,
before taking a closer look at sysinst, I assumed that it was not
possible to add the plus e. g. to /home like I would have liked to
do! Up until recently this was one of the things that bugged me about
NetBSD's installer. I read The NetBSD Guide's chapter on the
installation and that info is not in there, either.

[eerie837]Editing a partition size

While it's quite common for installers to allow specifying the unit
as a suffix to the size, NetBSD does this differently. Sysinst allows
for changing the unit via an option in the menu. It's definitely
useful to be able to switch to GB when partitioning large drives (and
I guess due to the portability aspect of NetBSD it may make sense for
some architectures to allow entering sectors or cylinders for more
control).

[eerie838]Changing input units

The drawback with NetBSD's method is that this makes the EFI
partition appear as 0 GB as it's only 128 MB. Allowing for input
sizes like '20g' and '128m' would be more flexible. Then again
setting the EFI partition's size (or just leaving it alone
altogether) before switching units of course also works. Maybe
displaying the size as 0.1 or something instead of 0 in that case
would still make sense?

[eerie839]Partition sizes now in GB

Adding more partitions is easy to do; the first menu option below the
table will let you do that. Sysinst asks for a mountpoint in that
case and adds the new partition to the table. Not being able to
cancel the operation with ESC feels a little weird. If the box said
"Mount point (leave empty to cancel)?: " or something like that it
would be clear how to abort adding another partition.

[eerie840]Adding a custom partition

I simulated fat-fingering the input here by "accidentally" creating a
"/s" partition. Much to my frustration I did not find out how to
delete partitions from the table! Yes, since /usr and /var are
initially of size 0, one can deduce that allocating no space to it
will probably make the installer discard them. It's details like
these that make sysinst feel somewhat unfriendly and leave a negative
impression.

I also don't like that it's not possible (or I was at least unable to
find out how to do it) to change the mount point once the table entry
is there. These two problems are also likely much worse with an MBR
slice as BSD disklabels have a maximum number of partitions. If
you're doing a complex layout, better get it right the first time!
It's probably less of a problem for regular NetBSD users, but people
who are new to an OS and are giving it a first try are not *that*
unlikely to change their mind over the partitioning. The feeling of
being unable to undo a mistake is discouraging.

[eerie841]Two new partitions added - one as a deliberate mistake

After finishing the partitioning, an overview of the layout is
presented that the user can either accept - or cancel the
installation. Again as a user I can't say that I feel in control
here. This screen basically asks: "Is this ok?". And the only option
besides "yes, go ahead" is "no, let me start over completely". How
about "let me go back to the partition editor and fix one small
mistake"? Why isn't there an option to modify this layout, and can I
only accept or discard it? Again, this is probably not so much a
problem for people who regularly install NetBSD. As someone who does
so infrequently, I'm not entirely satisfied with this.

[eerie842]Partition layout overview

Next is another screen that gives the user the chance of "yes" and
"no". While it feels a bit redundant, I think it makes sense to make
sure people are aware that at this point the changes will be written
to the drive and data previously on it will be destroyed. It could
probably still be another window over the last screen rather than a
separate one. That's a relatively minor point, though.

[eerie843]Make changes to the drive?

Writing the system to disk

Acknowledging the previous question, sysinst creates the partitions
and filesystem(s). Now the user gets to choose which components of
the OS to install. I like the options as well as the text.

[eerie844]Selecting the distribution sets

Now the user has to select the source for the distribution sets. The
text only mentions FTP and NFS as requiring a network while this is
of course the case for HTTP as well. I assume that this is because
the other two are traditional sources while HTTP was added later but
the text was not updated. This is of course another nit-picky one.

[eerie845]Selecting the installation source

With the source selected, the actual installation (unpacking of the
distribution sets) begins. What I find a little strange is that while
there is a progress bar, it's for every single distribution tarball
individually. There's no global progress displayed anywhere! And
since NetBSD consists of a respectable number of sets, I actually
kind of miss this. Fortunately the system is fairly slim (especially
compared to many other operating systems) and so the installation
doesn't take too long (even on machines with old, slow drives).

[eerie846]Extracting a distribution set

When all the sets were extracted, there's an information screen
letting the user know that the new system can now be configured.
While in theory the process could be streamlined and this screen be
dropped, the completion of the data transfer is probably significant
enough to warrant it.

[eerie847]Set extraction complete

System configuration

The first thing that the installer lets you do to configure the
system is setting a root password. While this is not technically
necessary, basically everybody will want to do that, so it's a
logical choice to present it automatically.

[eerie848]Setting the root password

Afterwards, sysinst presents a very nice configuration menu with
various options that allow for convenient configuration of some
basics. The "Configure additional items as needed." would be fine -
if all options were self-explanatory. For newcomers however, they
aren't. I would suggest changing "Enable xdm" to "Enable xdm (X11
display manager)", "Enable cgd" to "Enable cgd (cryptographic disk
driver)" and "Enable lvm" to "Enable lvm (logical volume manager)".

[eerie849]Configuration menu

You usually want to configure the network on your system. If you
select the appropriate menu item, you get a list of detected
interfaces to pick from. I'm going to make my usual suggestion here:
Consider adding the MAC address for each interface!

While it's often perfectly obvious which one you want to select, this
is not always the case. I don't know how often NetBSD is being
deployed in datacenters these days, but servers often have several
interfaces and it can be very beneficial for the admins to decide
based on the MAC address which one is which (especially since you
cannot expect penguins to be familiar with BSD interface naming!). 

[eerie850]Network interface selection

Next is selecting the network media type. Not setting it means
attempting autoconfiguration. This is another case where sysinst
gives me a weird feeling. From the presented information alone I have
no clue if leaving it empty will cause the installer to send DHCP
requests or if it's just going to assume 1000baseT full duplex or
something for the media type. Also making this a text input rather
than a list to pick from automatically (pun intended) makes people
wonder what the supported values are. This is not ideal from a UX
perspective.

[eerie851]Setting the network media type

Even when leaving the field empty to enable autoconfiguration, a menu
pops up asking you if that's really what you wanted to do. That feels
very redundant and is another strong indication that this section of
the installer could use an overhaul.

[eerie852]Autoconfiguration?

After that, sysinst asks for the hostname of the machine. Since
there's no standard way of handling this, I always appreciate it when
the installer provides a clue as to whether it expects an FQDN or the
short form. As I have the habit of using the former, the first time I
installed NetBSD I of course noticed my mistake in the next screen.

[eerie853]Hostname configuration

NetBSD expects the short form for the hostname, so in the next screen
it asks for the domain name. If DHCP was used, it proposes the domain
name it got from it. My suggestion would be to either indicate on the
previous screen that only the short form is acceptable, or to
indicate that either form is and to skip this screen if an FQDN was
entered as the hostname.

[eerie854]Domain name configuration

In the next screen, sysinst will provide a summary of the network
parameters and ask the user whether they are ok.

[eerie855]Network parameter summary

If the user accepts them, the installer offers to write the
configuration to disk. This is super helpful for people new to NetBSD
who will certainly enjoy a working network connection before having
to dig into the documentation just for that! However there might be
use cases where people use an installation network to access the
distfiles while the actual production network settings are different.
So I guess presenting the choice to the user is the right thing to
do.

[eerie856]Make network configuration persistent?

Next is configuring the time zone. NetBSD defaults to UTC which is a
sensible choice. Users who prefer localtime can select items from a
list.

[eerie857]Time zone selection step 1

If a continent was chosen in step 1 (like Europe in my case), another
list of zones in that area are now presented.

[eerie858]Time zone selection step 2

Choosing an item selects it and makes sysinst jump to the "Exit" menu
item which is a nice convenience.

[eerie859]Time zone selection step 3

Most people will not want to use only the base system, so making the
pkgin package manager available is something that is commonly done.
Luckily sysinst makes doing this really easy. In this screen, the
installer allows you to configure the remote repository, protocol to
use and so on.

[eerie860]Configuring pkgin repository

Once repository access has been configured, sysinst installs pkgin
and uses it to update the package summary.

[eerie861]Fetching the package summary

When that's done, the installer lets you know that pkgin has been
successfully installed.

[eerie862]Pkgin ready

Some people prefer to (or have to) build packages from source.
Sysinst assists in installing the Pkgsrc tree on the system, too.
Doing this is quite similar to the previous action: The user first
needs to configure a remote source ...

[eerie863]Preparing to fetch pkgsrc

... and then the compressed tarball is getting downloaded and
extracted. Very convenient!

[eerie864]Fetching and installing pkgsrc

Another very common thing that a lot of people will want to do is
creating an unprivileged user. This works without any fancy dialog
windows by just asking for input of the name.

[eerie865]Adding a user

It then asks whether to add the user to the wheel group, which is
excellent. For newcomers (especially from Linux) I'd love to see a
little explanation that this means allowing the user to use the 'su'
command to become root. Otherwise this is fine.

[eerie866]Add user to the wheel group?

Then you get to select which of the three shells that the base system
provides to use. This works effectively.

[eerie867]Which shell for the new user?

Finally you are asked to set the password for the user. Altogether
the process is pretty bare bones as you can neither customize the
home directory nor can you pick the UID or assign the user to
additional groups. But you can always create (or modify) users
manually after booting into the installed system, right?

[eerie868]Password for user

There are other options here, but they are simply on/off switches.
The last item is for finishing the configuration.

[eerie869]Finishing the configuration

The last screen after the installation gives new users some valuable
advice like reading afterboot(8) (you installed the man set, right?)
and customizing /etc/rc.conf.

[eerie870]Installation finished

After acknowledging this, the installer returns to the main menu,
where you can choose to reboot into the newly installed system.

[eerie871]Back on the main menu for rebooting

Installation over serial

To explore more of the installer, this time I'm aiming for a more
customized installation fit for a server.

To be able to install via serial, it's necessary to escape to the
loader prompt and then issue the command:

consdev=com0,115200

[eerie872]Setting the console to serial in the loader

Changing the console to serial resets the terminal screen. Now it's
possible to just ask the loader to boot the kernel regularly:

boot

[eerie873]Booting the installation system

Just before the installer starts, it asks for the type of terminal
that is connected. It needs to know this to make the best use of
available features. I'm going with xterm here.

[eerie874]Terminal type selection

The first screen of the installer is the same as in the previous
installation which used the video console.

[eerie875]Language selection

The same is true for the main menu ...

[eerie876]Sysinst main menu

... and the information screen about the installation procedure.

[eerie877]Installation overview screen

I've given this machine two virtual drives, so this time I could
choose which one to install to.

[eerie878]Selecting the installation target

While for the first installation I've taken the straight-forward
path, this time I went with the extended partitioning. This portion
of the installer allows for cryptographic volumes, virtual disk
images, logical volume management and software raids in addition to
more complex partitioning in general. The text contains the
instructions to follow and works well for that matter.

[eerie879]Extended partitioning menu

Selecting one of the drives opens a menu with various configuration
options. People who only ever go the standard path through the
installer miss out on a lot of its capabilities! At least I was
surprised by the many options when I first explored extended
partitioning. Beforehand I considered sysinst to be quite limited,
but that is obviously not the case.

[eerie880]Configuration options for a drive

I went with "Format as RAID", but since the drive is empty, sysinst
first asks about which partitioning schema to use. Your options here
are GPT, MBR or BSD disklabels.

[eerie881]Selecting the partitioning schema

The installer went ahead and proposed a partition of type RAID for
me. It would span the entire available space.

[eerie882]Proposed RAID partition

Accepting the the partition (going with the proposal or changing the
size) takes you back to the partitioning menu. A new partition dk0
has appeared in the list and ld0's status has changed to USED. (As a
newcomer I ask myself what dk is, though. A search in the manpages
does not solve the mystery.)

[eerie883]RAID partition created on the first drive

I did the same thing for the second drive and as expected, dk1
appeared.

[eerie884]Second RAID partition created

The next step is to select "Create Software RAID", which opens a
window with configuration options.

[eerie885]Software RAID configuration

Selecting "Disks:" lets the user add or remove disks from the RAID
array.

[eerie886]Software RAID disk selection

Choosing "Add" allows to add members to the array. I think this is a
little cumbersome, especially if you want to assemble a large RAID
with several members. I would suggest getting rid of the window
that's used to add or remove disks and instead provide one where
available disks can be marked as member or unused. That would
streamline RAID creation.

[eerie887]Adding a disk

After adding disks dk0 and dk1 as RAID members and not selecting any
spares, the next thing to do is to choose the RAID level. Sysinst
obviously does not take disk requirements into account: It offers
RAID 5 even though that requires three or more disks while only two
were added. So that's another thing that could be improved.

[eerie888]Selecting the RAID level

I went with creating a mirror. Besides selecting the disks to use and
the RAID level I left everything else alone.

[eerie889]RAID configuration complete

The RAID configuration was done, but the list does not reflect that.
The text said to select "Save Changes" after configuring a RAID, so
that's what needs to be done next.

[eerie890]RAID configured but not created, yet

What then happened again surprised me: The RAID is being built by
supposedly writing parity information! This is very weird. I selected
mirroring and RAID 1 does not use parity information - mirroring
means having the same data on both drives after all! But this is
probably raidctl(8)'s fault which simply calls mirrored data "parity"
as well.

[eerie891]Building RAID: Syncing...

After the sync is complete, the new raid0 device appears in the list.
According to the information it is a RAID 1 with two disks and 0
spares. It appears that what I intended to do has worked out.

[eerie892]RAID synced

Now the RAID can be partitioned like the disks beforehand. The same
menu window is used for that. This time I go with editing the
partitions.

[eerie893]Partitioning the RAID

The RAID array doesn't contain any data, yet, so it needs a
partitioning schema, first. It's possible to use GPT or disklabels,
here.

[eerie894]Partition schema selection for the array

Going with GPT, the user is then presented with an empty partition
list and the option to add partitions.

[eerie895]Empty partition table

Adding a new partition presents the user with various options like
partition type, size, mount point and so on.

[eerie896]Adding a new partition

Other than the default FFSv2, there are various other types that you
can pick from. There's also "other type" which opens another menu
with less common options like vinum, FreeBSD's old volume manager.

[eerie897]Partition types

I changed everything required to make this new partition be the EFI
system partition required to boot from on EFI systems.

[eerie898]Values for an EFI partition

When creating a new partition for a filesystem that is going to be
mounted, mount options can be selected.

[eerie899]Filesystem mount options

After adding a swap partition I added a third one for the root
filesystem with the values shown on the screenshot below.

[eerie900]The root partition

While doing much more comprehensive partitioning is of course
possible, I don't think it's necessary to do that here. A simple
layout on a software RAID should be fine for the test system.

It appears that this section of the installer was re-used from the
standard partitioning path. This is why the text says "This is your
last chance to change" the partitions - which is not true. Accepting
the partitioning returns you to the extended partition menu from
where you could just choose to edit it again. It's a small
inaccuracy, though.

[eerie901]Partition table for raid0

The new partitions appear in the list on the main extended
partitioning menu now. So everything is ready to proceed to the
actual installation.

[eerie902]Extended partitioning done

The instructions didn't say that the latest changes need to be saved
again, but if you just try to go ahead, sysinst will simply ask you
if you want to save or not.

[eerie903]Save partitioning changes?

Like in the previous installation, the next choice is the
distribution sets to be installed. I'll go for a custom installation
this time.

[eerie904]Selecting the distribution sets

The standard selection of sets is fairly minimal. I would suggest to
at least include the manpages by default!

[eerie905]Custom installation: Standard selection of sets

I chose to install the compiler toolchain (so that Pkgsrc would be
usable) as well as the manpages (of course!) and miscellaneous
(simply because I have no idea what's in it).

[eerie906]Custom installation: A couple more sets enabled

To not simply repeat the first installation, I'm going with HTTP as
the source for the sets instead of the local medium.

[eerie907]Installing over HTTP

This of course triggers network configuration which was only done
after the installation in the previous attempt. I'm not providing
screenshots of the other configuration steps as they are identical.

[eerie908]Selecting the network interface

After the network is configured, the mirror to fetch the sets from
needs to be selected.

[eerie909]Selecting the mirror to use

And then the installation begins! Or not, since the filesystem for
some reason turns out to be read-only ...

[eerie910]Whoops! Disk is ro?!

Pain points

The above section ending rather abruptly is not due to any malice on
my side trying to break poor little sysinst. In fact I tried to do
several dozen installations over the past three weeks, trying out
various setups. Truth be told: I've failed time and time again.

I didn't mention it before, but after the first installation I wanted
to show a screenshot of the graphical NetBSD system. The installation
succeeded, but the system would panic during boot. Bhyve is more of a
niche thing and not among the hypervisors supported by NetBSD, so I'm
not complaining. But I haven't been able to finish *any* installation
after picking extended partitioning. Going with a software RAID makes
the FS read-only. Trying to create a simple LVM lead to this:

Status: Command failed
> Command: lvm pvcreate -ffy /dev/rdk2
> Hit enter to continue
> ---
> Device /dev/rdk2 not found (or ignored by filtering)

I read the first few chapters of The NetBSD Guide, hoping to better
understand what I was doing wrong. It's a good document but
unfortunately pretty outdated, too. When I read "The examples from
this chapter were created with NetBSD 8.0.", I got a feeling what to
expect (that version was released 7 years ago, in 2018).

I honestly don't mind that the image explaining partitioning uses DOS
as the other operating system in a dual-boot setup. But the guide
does not even mention GPT at all! It's all legacy MBR which is not
terribly helpful for newer machines at this point. Also much to my
surprise, the extended partitioning is not even covered. Yes,
Software RAID, LVM and friends are covered, but only how to set them
up via the CLI on a running system. Sorry, I don't want to do that, I
want to install to a more flexible means of storage than a bare disk
with fixed partition sizes!

The system console messages appearing on the screen and messing up
parts of the installer can be very annoying, too. Maybe just start
sysinst on different virtual terminal to get rid of this?

Installing on real hardware presented me with other problems - and
even standard installations can fail. On one machine it took
incredibly long - the modules.txr.xz set alone took half an hour with
the installation at times going to as slow writes as roughly 4 KiB/s
or even stalling entirely. The base set took over 1.5 hours! I assume
NetBSD might be struggling with the NVMe? To add insult to injury
when it was finally done with all the sets (I had picked a full
installation...), this was the result:

Status: Command failed
> Command: /sbin/fsck_ffs -p -q /dev/dk0
> Hit enter to continue
> ---
> /dev/rdk0: BAD SUPER BLOCK: CAN'T FIND SUPERBLOCK
>
> /dev/rdk0: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck_ffs MANUALLY.

I tried my luck in the opposite direction and used one of the older
laptops that I have. The installer started regularly but at one point
simply dropped me to a shell, saying "sysinst terminated."

The error message was something along the lines of "Screen too narrow
(70 + 5 > 64) for menu". I was able to solve that by connecting a VGA
monitor to it, but that was unexpected nevertheless. This little
experiment proved useful, though, as it revealed a portion of sysinst
that I had not seen before: The installer told me that this machine
didn't provide strong entropy and gave me several options for dealing
with that. It's really nice that NetBSD did great work in that
regard!

Conclusion

Well, after all those problems I encountered, you might expect me to
condemn sysinst. I won't. In fact I like the general workflow - minus
the weird parts. Sysinst has a lot of neat ideas in addition to some
quirks. As mentioned at the beginning, I like the hotkey system a
lot. Trying to reserve "x" to finish a screen is one nice detail. I
really like the configuration options after the installation. That
part is very well done.

On the other hand, network autoconfiguration is weird. I miss the
option to decide on configuring the system for v4 only for example. A
couple of things could certainly be improved, but few things are
perfect. The elephant in the room though is the major problems that I
ran into. I often find myself exploring less common paths in
programs, which sometimes leads to uncovering bugs. It's not just
sysinst but it happens to me often when I use something not just
superficially.

When I sat down to concern myself with the NetBSD installer, I
expected that my major critique would be that it doesn't do ZFS -
which is a shame since the availability of that filesystem is one of
the things that make NetBSD appeal to me. Various other problems have
definitely overshadowed this, though. I remain hopeful that these
issues can be addressed, and perhaps the solution lies in clearer
guidance for users. As I said, I'm not very familiar with NetBSD. But
I'd like to change that fact in the long run. And ideally at some
point I'd be able to say: "Of course it runs NetBSD!"

What's next?

In the next article I'll take a closer look at DragonFly BSD's
installer.

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  * Installing *BSD in 2025 part 3 - A critical look at
    NetBSD's installer
  * Installing *BSD in 2025 part 2 - A critical look at
    OpenBSD's installer
  * Installing *BSD in 2025 part 1 - A critical look at
    FreeBSD's installer
  * Installing *BSD in 2025 part 0b - Modern myths: AI ramblings
    (NetBSD and OpenBSD)
  * Installing *BSD in 2025 part 0a - Modern myths: AI ramblings
    (DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD)

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