It's my (laptop) desktop. Which is sort of funny, because it's got weak graphics support (e.g. accelerated gfx). Despite that here's why I keep it:
It's a model of development beauty. From a single codebase, it supports 58 tier one and two architectures.
It "feels" incredibly solid, by design and construction.
It's sort of a side project, but the defacto standard source-based package management (pkgsrc) is the nicest I've used. It's interesting, because one might think "what's to get excited about with package management?". Nothing, if things are going well. Minimal dependency-hell problems, no issues with base-system versus pkgsrc versus "hand-built" installations. No problems rolling your own packages to add to pkgsrc for your own custom packages. And all driven by simple Makefiles.
The kernel and userland are also built with Makefiles, and lend themselves to exploration. Especially some of the userland tools when you consider what they're tasked to do: run portably across multiple architectures. Bootstrap systems. Cross-building. It's interesting, and there's lots to learn and take advantage of.
Even though it's solid and there's lots of "tried and true" methods in there, there's lots of interesting new work going on. When the project was fiddling with SMP, it tried interesting things[0]. It's doing interesting things now with virtualization, with Xen (dom0 and domU), RUMP[1], which is interesting for running kernel components in userspace, but even moreso because it's not tied to NetBSD [1][2]...
I could go on and on. Couple more points though: it's mostly BSD licensed, which makes for corporate friendly code. Secondly, the features here come with a super-friendly knowledgeable community as a bonus.
It's a model of development beauty. From a single codebase, it supports 58 tier one and two architectures.
It "feels" incredibly solid, by design and construction.
It's sort of a side project, but the defacto standard source-based package management (pkgsrc) is the nicest I've used. It's interesting, because one might think "what's to get excited about with package management?". Nothing, if things are going well. Minimal dependency-hell problems, no issues with base-system versus pkgsrc versus "hand-built" installations. No problems rolling your own packages to add to pkgsrc for your own custom packages. And all driven by simple Makefiles.
The kernel and userland are also built with Makefiles, and lend themselves to exploration. Especially some of the userland tools when you consider what they're tasked to do: run portably across multiple architectures. Bootstrap systems. Cross-building. It's interesting, and there's lots to learn and take advantage of.
Even though it's solid and there's lots of "tried and true" methods in there, there's lots of interesting new work going on. When the project was fiddling with SMP, it tried interesting things[0]. It's doing interesting things now with virtualization, with Xen (dom0 and domU), RUMP[1], which is interesting for running kernel components in userspace, but even moreso because it's not tied to NetBSD [1][2]...
I could go on and on. Couple more points though: it's mostly BSD licensed, which makes for corporate friendly code. Secondly, the features here come with a super-friendly knowledgeable community as a bonus.
Try it for 4 weeks. You'll like it.
[0]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Features (see symmetric multiprocessing)
[1]http://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/
[2]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anykernel