Assuming a typical desktop environment (GUI, LibreOffice, javascript-capable browser like Firefox or Chromium), on a Raspberry Pi 3B or a 3B+, can one expect any substantial speed gains by running netBSD on an older Pi like that, instead of running Raspberry Pi OS?

Anyone with experience one way or another? I think that even if the consensus was "they're very similar in performance" then I could see allocating one of my old Pi to NetBSD as a learning tool. If it was expected to be snappier, then it seems like it would be a good OS for that kind of old hardware. My intuition is, however, that the primary things slowing down something like a Pi 3 are the demands of modern web browsers (I'm sure Links2 or Dillo would be snappy on it, but a lot of websites won't work well on them), and perhaps as a distant second, a big office suite like LibreOffice (as opposed to lighter weight alternatives). Perhaps photo editing is similarly demanding. IDK. But I suspect most of it is the browser, and that makes me question whether the underlying OS (linux vs bsd) makes much difference if you're running those demanding GUI programs.

I'd have asked the same thing about FreeBSD, but it's my understanding that onboard wifi is unsupported by FreeBSD.
(source: https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi#What_works)

I can't see it making much difference but I am no expert. If things are falling short with LibreOffice or browsing on a 3B/3B+ I wouldn't expect choice of OS to make much difference. You would be better off with more memory and higher clock speeds; a more recent Pi.

The best thing about the Pi SBC range is you can usually grab a spare SD Card and try it for yourself.

hippy wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 08, 2025 3:16 pm

You would be better off with more memory and higher clock speeds; a more recent Pi.

The best thing about the Pi SBC range is you can usually grab a spare SD Card and try it for yourself.

I do have a 400 and a Pi 5 (8 GB); my inquiry is motivated by a desire to maintain the usefulness of the Pi 3B/3B+ boards in a GUI desktop environment. As time goes on, it's harder for a non-upgradable SBC to maintain that usefulness in the face of ever-more demanding software applications and web content.

While I have no doubt that RPiOS Lite would run very fast indeed on a 3B / 3B+ (I already was impressed by it on a Pi Zero W back in the day), a TUI/CLI interface is not quite adequate for my use case. If the a BSD with GUI desktop won't make much of a difference (and yes, I can test that - was just trying to save the headache if someone else already did), then I suppose I should scrutinize the software applications running, no doubt starting with the browser, and then perhaps looking at whether much could be gained by swapping out LO for something lighter, or if LO isn't a significant factor (in Writer, if I could out-type its rendering on the monitor, I deemed it too slow. But startup times matter a little, too).

the purpose is learning
if you want to learn netbsd, slide a new sdcard in there and do it
can always pop the old card back in like it never happened :lol:

cspan wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 08, 2025 4:04 pm

my inquiry is motivated by a desire to maintain the usefulness of the Pi 3B/3B+ boards in a GUI desktop environment.

Middle to long term I doubt that's going to be any more feasible than keeping old X86 gear working. The main issue doesn't seem to be OS per se to me but lack of raw speed and limited memory; with Pi you don't have the starting point of 'erase Windows, install a leaner Linux' which usually gives an instant win.

Memory on a 3B/3B+ is only 1 GB and most would recommend 4 or 8 GB for a desktop. You can keep old gear running - I was using a 3B until recently. It was tolerable but not entirely enjoyable. And you really notice that when you go back from what you have become used to. It works, but whether it's useful as some kind of substitute for the latest, is debatable.

It may be, if you are serious about keeping the old reasonably usable, you need to look at lightweight and stripped-down OS like DietPi, TinyLinux, or building your own images. But, as you note, desktop software doesn't stand still, and that can eventually leave the basic proposition untenable.

The O/S used will have little effect, the RPi3 is under powered for modern day web sites - to get any gain, you will need to give it at least 2GB swap to get Firefox working at a semi reasonable speed.

I have run RPi Zero 2W with 2GB swap using Firefox, but it is extremely slow, & I used to run RPi3B using Firefox, but is was quite slow also - lack of ram & slow processors are the problem.

Having been using RPi5, even RPi4 seems slow when using the internet.... ;)

Plus, the RPi5 seems quite slow against my Intel i5 / 8GB ram / NVME regular desktop computer - it is all relevent.... 8-)

kerry_s wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 08, 2025 6:06 pm

the purpose is learning
if you want to learn netbsd, slide a new sdcard in there and do it
can always pop the old card back in like it never happened :lol:

OK well I've done some exploring, not just with NetBSD.

For this thread - I tried a couple of different ways of instlaling NetBSD, both of which are mentioned on this page:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/

The first method, I imaged the OS using the "standard images" mentioned on the page. The dd businss did not work, but Raspberry Pi imager did. It was relatively easy to get to a terminal. From there I took a guess and typed "startx" and got a sparse visual desktop with a terminal window already open. There was no launch menu or anything else of note; I suspect it was up to the user to configure it for a software repository and install the bits and pieces from there. That level of effort wasn't quite what I was looking for, so I then tried "Installation via ebijun's image" further down the page.

That produced a similar result, and startx got me a slightly less sparse desktop. There seemed to be some sort of launch menu (sparse!) but half of the items were in Japanese or similar script. No easy way to go from there. This led me to realize how "spoiled" I must be for installers like Raspberry Pi OS and Linux Mint. Even Manjaro - which I tried next. Manjaro installed OK but didn't recognize the 3B's wifi card. Was looking for ethernet. LibreOffice, not included in the 6 GB image, was available in the repos, but the version was end of life (version 7.x)

Next I tried RISC OS. In short, it was weird and interesting, but it didn't really solve any problem that I had, and looked like it might produce some new ones (file formats that I suspect as being either proprietary, or with such low interoperability that I wasn't that interested in producing anything on the OS that I might want to get out of it). It also didn't boot all that fast. I expected it to be very zippy. It was just OK in that regard. I moved on and back to Raspberry Pi OS, where I had many updates waiting for me.

The 3B seemed unusually slow handling the updates. LibreOffice wouldn't even start (I waited 3 minutes for Writer and it never opened). Even with a clean install and different microSD card (both were class 10; the first was Kingston 32GB, the second Sandisk A1, 16 GB), Writer would not start. Firefox was unusable. Even going to lite.cnn.com in Firefox it was slow.

My tentative concluision is in agreement with the post above. The usability of the 3rd gen Pi is sharply impaired for the mainstream GUI applications that come with Pi OS. One must either strip it down to ultralight, limited GUI apps, or relegate it to a terminal-based UI like RPi OS Lite.

A sad day. I liked my 3B and 3B+, with full size HDMI ports, analog sound, and no vulns from speculative execution. While there's things I can do in TUI, like writing in wordgrinder and emailing in alpine, there's plenty that I can't do well. I may have to pass these SBCs on.

cspan wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 09, 2025 6:59 pm

Next I tried RISC OS.

It's unlike any current OS. It is extremely zippy, but also has its own way of multitasking that most people won't find intuitive. There are browsers, just not the familiar ones. It uses a forked filesystem, which no other OS has used since Classic Macintosh days.

‘Remember the Golden Rule of Selling: "Do not resort to violence."’ — McGlashan.
Pronouns: he/him

cspan wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 09, 2025 6:59 pm

A sad day. I liked my 3B and 3B+, with full size HDMI ports, analog sound, and no vulns from speculative execution. While there's things I can do in TUI, like writing in wordgrinder and emailing in alpine, there's plenty that I can't do well. I may have to pass these SBCs on.

Well the internet is just 1 big visual image video and mostly advertising beast nowadays. 100+ organizations that do real-time ad-hoc ad-bidding, that is what many pages are.
But for local LAN only can be different. Like playing own local H264 video for example. Or showing a local home automation page. Or maybe Node-RED canvas. I have some thumb-sized HDMI-VGA adaptors, those can be handy if an old VGA monitor should show something.

I tested 1 of my Pi3B with 64-bit Debian Testing pre-Bookworm playing some 640x480 or so. That worked really well, but as said in this topic, things should fit in that 1GB RAM, else forget it. 4x Cortex-A53 is still fine, there are actually new SBCs designed still with similar 4x Cortex-A55, although they have variants with 8GB RAM or so. But for some CLI based server, a Pi3B still can be fine.

Other OS won't matter that much, it all depends how and which HW is used. For RPi camera, latest RPiOS64 is great, no way you get that with something else. Same for display/HW acceleration. But those are not really generic traditional PC like applications. BSD or NetBSD or FreeBSD I see as good performing for non-GUI use-cases.

Last edited by redvli on Tue Jun 10, 2025 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

cspan wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 09, 2025 6:59 pm

A sad day. I liked my 3B and 3B+, with full size HDMI ports, analog sound, and no vulns from speculative execution. While there's things I can do in TUI, like writing in wordgrinder and emailing in alpine, there's plenty that I can't do well. I may have to pass these SBCs on.

It's a sad day whenever something you've come to love is no longer fit for purpose, when that's not under your control.

Especially when it's "as good as it ever was, runs perfectly fine using what it has always run", because some external evolution requires newer software, even a newer OS, which doesn't run or not as well, and that evolution cannot be resisted or ignored.

There comes that point where one has to limit yourself to what does work or move on, upgrade, and find some use for the old which is appropriate for it or hand it on to someone who can find a use for it.

I was sad when I had to abandon my XP system and move to Windows 10 but using XP had become increasingly untenable and problematic. A part of that was decreasing support for 32-bit, moving to only 64-bit development and support.

Raspberry Pi seem to be going that way with their VS Code Pico Extension only supporting 64-bit on a Pi.

It will be another sad day if Raspberry Pi does drop support for and older Pi SBC enter the "works just as well as it did yesterday" but "not recommended because it's not supported, won't get security and bug fixes, and latest software may increasingly not run" domain.

hippy, you said it so well. No point in typing more than "+1" to your post above.

I'm evaluating what to do with the 3B and 3B+. RISC OS is like dabbling in a foreign language of a country I'll never visit. Strictly speaking, it's probably a better use of my time than watching TV or doomscrolling. But ... I think it's just a historical curiosity for me.

RPiOS lite would sharpen my command line skills, but it hasn't escaped me (no pun intended) that there's nothing stopping me from using the command line on my Pi 400 or Pi 5. Yet - save for scripted rsync backups and transfers - I don't do it, because on those machines I don't have to. I'm not a programmer, gamer, or a maker, just a desktop user. Perhaps that makes me somewhat atypical among Pi users, IDK.

Even if NetBSD had a very polished GUI installer that included "recommended software" for desktop users like RPIOS can, perhaps it would still struggle on the 3B. There may not be much fat to be cut if you're running such software on any GUI OS.

BTW, as a follow up to a post I made above, I was a bit surprised to see that RPiOS is running some kind of version 7.4 of LibreOffice, not the 24.2.x I'm running on Linux Mint. That's even on the Pi 5 I think. Does that reflect a limit on the resources available to fork it, or are there hardware or OS limitations that are presenting a roadblock?

cspan wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 11, 2025 10:54 pm

BTW, as a follow up to a post I made above, I was a bit surprised to see that RPiOS is running some kind of version 7.4 of LibreOffice, not the 24.2.x I'm running on Linux Mint.

Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian. The freeze date for Debian Bookworm where they fix the package versions was early 2023. LibreOffice 7.4 was the stable version at that time.

cspan wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 11, 2025 10:54 pm

Does that reflect a limit on the resources available to fork it, or are there hardware or OS limitations that are presenting a roadblock?

No. It is due to how Debian does its releases.

trejan wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 11, 2025 11:26 pm

Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian. The freeze date for Debian Bookworm where they fix the package versions was early 2023. LibreOffice 7.4 was the stable version at that time.

I knew about RPIOS being based on Debian but I had forgotten about the freeze policy. Thanks for the reminder!