NetBSD Desktop

August 9, 2026

NetBSD 11 is out, so I couldn’t think of a reason of not making it my main OS (at least for the time being).

Hardware

I got dirt cheap random box with nice hardware inside it:

~ $ fastfetch -l none
bsandro@
--------
OS: NetBSD 11.0 amd64
Kernel: NetBSD 11.0
Uptime: 6 days, 17 hours, 18 mins
Packages: 343 (pkgsrc)
Shell: bash 5.3.15
Display (LG ULTRAGEAR): 1920x1080 in 24", 120 Hz
WM: ctwm 4.1.0 (X11)
Terminal: tmux 3.6b
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 (8) @ 4.20 GHz
GPU 1: Intel Device 5912 (VGA compatible)
GPU 2: Intel Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 630 (KBL GT2)
Memory: 9.05 GiB / 14.94 GiB (61%)
Swap: 576.64 MiB / 15.44 GiB (4%)
Disk (/): 23.04 GiB / 204.78 GiB (11%) - ffs
Local IP (urtwn0): 192.168.10.167/24
Locale: en_US.UTF-8

Yes in 2026 I still think that 8-16 gigs of RAM is just fine (despite me having 64gb since 2015 or so).

Setup and initial configs

The official handbook describes everything in detail so I won’t be going over it. My case is simple - NetBSD as single OS, no encryption nor raid so everything works with simple defaults.

I didn’t want to disrupt the work of my linux box so I just hooked it with ethernet cable to the new machine and exported everything via NFS.

Stock CTWM felt okay and it turns out I don’t care as much about DE/WM so I keep it.

Max open files hard limit was increased in v11 (or maybe before) so no need to rebuild the kernel for that. Soft limit is still can be set by /etc/login.conf, so that’s what I did - set openfiles-cur to 3000.

Rest of the fine-tuning was installing various programs via pkgin; I was able to find almost everything I need. It also has a ton of cool monospace fonts so I didn’t even had to bring my entire ~/.fonts :)

Tiny quirks (mostly unsolved for now)

There is a noticeable audio lag in firefox and SDL applications and probably somewhere else; audio/video desync is sad. mplayer performs tad better in that regard than mpv but still off. I’ve tuned it with sysctl but wasn’t able to make it perfect anyway. Might be related to me using an USB DAC.
I’ve enabled NVMM (hardware virtualization accelerator) and tried to use qemu to boot TempleOS, but without luck - it just fails to execute a VCPU and dies on me. Gotta figure that one out when I have willpower.
IPv6 has been a lackluster for me because of my ISP and probably something else - lots of times addresses don’t resolve, or they resolve wrong and servers don’t reply etc., so usually I just disable ipv6 completely on my systems. On NetBSD I can restrain it a little bit but full disable is only possible via kernel rebuild (which is VERY simple, to be fair).
nano (my go-to editor for everything) provided by packages is built without mouse support, felt strange to me. I’m sure there is a reason for that though.
alacritty works fine but cannot work with config autoreload for some reason - it was very nice to change the font on the fly without restarting the terminal emulator, but now I have to. I change fonts depending on my mood every now and then and sometimes it takes several iterations to get it right :-)
SDL2 cannot create a renderer with SDL_RENDERER_ACCELERATED flag for some reason (even though I believe that OS has proper intel GPU drivers/support). Must be an platform thing or something.

Overall impression

Good despite the tiny quirks I’ve described above. I shall continue my journey here (with occasional linux fallbacks I guess), but the system is solid and coherent. With the pkgsrc system it feels especially easy to hack with, and straightforward enough to wrap my mind around various bits and parts. The documentation is very good as well.

There is an idea hook two of the nice displays here (one 1280x1024, another is E-ink) and rock a coding battlestation like that, hopefully the integrated GPU will be able to handle that.