NetBSD has been a labor of love for a long, long time.

In the mid-90's I was a teenager with a 486-25 on a desk in a closet running NetBSD 0.9-1.0, connected to 10base2 going to my dad's office where there was a computer that dual booted to Linux. I learned so much from those systems; systems programming, how to really use the C programming language, sysadmin skills, reading network traces. A whole part of who I am today derives from those early experiences trying to figure out what the $## was going on while tracking -CURRENT.

Here something you might like : CS631 -- Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - NetBSD https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/netbsd.html

I'm retired from tech and a high school teacher these days and allowed to teach wack/out of level things.

I would love to teach operating systems with NetBSD, but between the space hardware stuff I do and the Verilog/digital logic/microprocessor architecture class I teach, I soak up all the interested students' elective slots.

Years ago I had to get a very old document off of a DOS diskette. So I tried:

* On Linux: accessing the diskette would cause a panic or a reboot or massive read failures.

* FreeBSD: panics all the time

* NetBSD: panics. But then I remembered it had rump. So I said, why not try that. Started up rump, got a few code dumps, but after a some tries I got a bit over 90% of the document off of the diskette. The main system had no issues with the rump kernel crashing.

So that alone is worth the "price of admission" :)