u/gargamel1497

These days everyone has a cape.

Whether it be the migration cape, the utterly brain-dead tiktok cape, that dirt block cape or some other cape of the recent years.

Nowadays most players have at least one cape.

But several years back things used to be different.

Back in the day you didn't just get a cape. There were as I remember two ways to get one: either to be at a Minecon, or to donate to OptiFine.

And since as kids most of us didn't have the money to either go to a Minecon nor to donate to OptiFine, we just didn't have capes, and neither did most players.

When someone had a cape back then, it was a personage of prestige and respect.

These days capes are no longer unique. There is no more point in wearing them.

Jeb's creeper book may not understand that, but when you take something exclusive and give it to everyone, then it stops being exclusive.

NetBSD is a fantastic operating system.

It is in fact the only normal operating system left. Linux has gone Rust+AI and I don't think it will take long for FreeBSD to follow its lead.

DragonFly BSD is almost dead, OpenBSD is way too paranoid, Haiku and ReactOS will take millenia to reach the point of usability and MidnightBSD just sucks.

But, asides from the weird mouse issues introduced in 10.0 and fixed in 11.0, NetBSD's Achilles' heel is the driver support.

NetBSD does have /some/ drivers, at least for my graphics card, but they are barely any better than VESA. I don't play many games but both Minecraft and Minetest have their framerates halved compared to what I get on Linux and OpenBSD and I think that's an optimistic measurement since I've heard many people not having any drivers whatsoever.

And I think we should resolve this issue. I have this feeling that soon many people might abandon Linux due to the things ongoing there, and NetBSD has the potential to be a viable replacement.

The solution to the driver problem might be just using someone else's drivers. It feels bad but that's actually what other folks do. FreeBSD literally uses Linux drivers. I still remember kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko" and it works just fine.

In NetBSD we could use OpenBSD drivers as OpenBSD is the closest operating system to NetBSD (OpenBSD was actually forked from NetBSD a long time ago).

When you look at an average OpenBSD firmware package, all it contains are binary blobs. If we could get them supported in NetBSD the driver problem would be for the most part solved.

Would studying the OpenBSD source code and replicating the blob loading code into NetBSD be some license violation?

That's been my thoughts.