1 Topic by bemc

  • bemc
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Topic: FOMO inside free software comunities?

I just got back from vacation and saw the Debian community’s decision on including LLM in Debian development. Yes, I know Hyperbola is already far away from that community, but I still think some shockwaves will reach us. I had to recall other Debian milestones, such as its decision to accept binary blobs, non-free repositories, or systemd. Even the Debian leader didn’t agree, but I suspect there’s some kind of fear of being left behind (FOMO) in that community, and that Debian should stay relevant and not miss that train.

If I understand correctly, one of the big concerns about LLM is the loss of control. In practice, this is already happening on a small and medium scale. I’ve seen teams that repeatedly generate the code for an entire package just to change details, simply because they lost control over the code. Fortunately, some are already aware of that risk.

The other thing is that this technology is very resource-intensive, especially memory and storage. This will make it even harder for many people to acquire new hardware. It’s interesting to see how the NetBSD community is already taking steps to avoid unnecessary hardware upgrades:
https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/117184030718497114

2 Reply by librecat

  • librecat
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  • Registered: 2025-07-29
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Re: FOMO inside free software comunities?

Yes NetBSD is looking alot better nowdays. I am starting to learn it on my main computer despite lack of gpu and wifi drivers. While i would love a silver bullet netbsd with every driver under the sun atleast i can be confident that a rx 6700 xt and a older generation wifi dongle or card has drivers that are alot more audited than linux. I really like the direction of netbsd nowdays and i also suspect that in the future hyperbolabsd will borrow alot more from netbsd

3 Reply by bemc (edited by bemc Yesterday 15:34:59)

  • bemc
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Re: FOMO inside free software comunities?

Yes, in the end the community says a lot about the character of a project. I celebrate the decisions of NetBSD to avoid complexity.
In my opinion, a simple/accessible OS provides great freedom to the user. On the other side hand, I think they still deliver binary blobs in the kernel. So, lets keep supporting Hyperbola on their unique mission.

Coming back to the hardware, in fact netbsd provides broad hardware support, just the laptop/desktop is a bit lacking. Of course things change a lot when one selects best-supported hardware for the OS of our choice.  In my case I use netbsd on raspberryPi 3 as my backup server, which is glued to my net-hub smile it works good.

Coming back too your GPU (and ignoring the binary blob problem), to my experience netbsd goes some years behind openbsd in GPU support. Openbsd already supports the RX 6700 xt, netbsd just up to RX 590. could be there at certain point. https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1158-netbsd … ity-thread