>>13072
It's mostly a culture thing. Supporting as many machines as possible is one of NetBSD's goals. It's actually easier to write drivers for Linux, Linux has an absurd amount of drivers and its developers have come up with lots of ways to reduce work when writing them.
NetBSD has also done a lot of work to help get this done, for instance, GCC only supports VAX to this day because NetBSD developers maintain it, and it has an automated testing framework that tests the system and pkgsrc on many architectures (and in the case of pkgsrc other OSes too) to ensure the system stays working.
NetBSD userlands also maintain backwards compatibility with old kernels. If a device ever gets a NetBSD kernel, it keeps on working forever. This is why there are still new binary packages for the PlayStation 2 NetBSD port that was abandoned in 2009:
http://www.jp.netbsd.org/ports/playstation2/
http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/playstation2
>>13073
The Linux kernel runs on far more platforms than NetBSD. However, most of those platforms aren't supported by a single distro, vendors make their own Linux-based systems for those architectures. A minority of architectures only run something like Buildroot that doesn't work for general purpose computing because Buildroot doesn't have, among other things, a way to update the system or install packages, which are done by reinstalling. For instance, the Linux kernel supports SH-3, but there are no SH-3 Linux distros, while NetBSD runs on several SH-3 machines.
Additionally, when Linux distros run on something other than ARM SBCs or x64 desktops, they're often very limited. NetBSD supports running on systems with no screen and only a serial terminal very well, has first-class support for installation over PXE and root on NFS, etc. With Linux, you have to figure out which distro supports PXE, which distro supports serial, and so on. For instance, I have a Hyperbola Linux install with working serial, but I had to install in a VM and configure serial before I could put it on real hardware.
If NetBSD is available on a machine, it means that the whole NetBSD system and binary packages are available for it. Not the case on Linux. Gentoo runs on PA-RISC, but you'll have to build packages on those 20yo machines yourself. NetBSD has binary packages for all platforms.
>>13074
>How is hardware support for modern PCs?
It's pretty good, but there are some details. The BSDs are going to work and support all hardware on most desktops, but there are some caveats. You need to check if the onboard wi-fi if any is supported. Even when an ethernet card is supported, most likely its hardware acceleration (checksum offloading, etc) isn't. OpenBSD doesn't support nvidia cards other than some very old ones from the 2000s. NetBSD used to be in a similar situation, but it's getting Nouveau support soon, although if you used it you know that driver is slow and buggy. Intel and AMD graphics cards are well supported. OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth at all. Also, don't expect the BSDs to support everything on a machine that just released, usually they're 1-2 years behind.
It's more complicated on laptops, you need to shop for a laptop that is known to be well supported, otherwise it's very likely that the system will install, but there won't be drivers for most of the hardware.
>How is backwards compatibility on the software side?
OpenBSD doesn't have any software backwards compatibility.
NetBSD has backwards compatibility going back to the 90s.
There's no reason to have software backwards compatibility other than enabling the existence of proprietary software, however. In OpenBSD, a new release comes with repositories completely rebuilt for that release, you're supposed to update your packages when you update OpenBSD, that'll reinstall all the packages you have installed.
>How is software distribution done?
OpenBSD is only supposed to be managed by its package manager. OpenBSD's repositories are small and outdated. Also, the OpenBSD package manager is written in Perl and VERY slow.
NetBSD, following its theme of portability, has a packaging system that runs on many operating systems, not just NetBSD. Thanks to this, it actually has one of the largest software repositories, bigger than most Linux distros, because all the users of proprietary unices and some more obscure systems like MINIX flock to NetBSD's package manager and help maintain it. NetBSD's packaging infrastructure is called pkgsrc, it's source-based and actually very much a pain in the ass to use, but you should just install a program called pkgin (there's an option in the installer to install it easily) that is a binary package manager and works very well.
>Can it run WINE and vidya?
OpenBSD has no games. I've unironically ported some FLOSS games to it so I had stuff to play. It doesn't even have many emulators, if you happen to be able to live off of emulation.
NetBSD is the same, effectively, "there are no NetBSD games". However, NetBSD has a Linux compatibility layer to run Linux software, and it also has WINE.
>Is it slow?
OpenBSD is one of the slowest systems I have ever used, the only slower ones I know are Solaris and Windows.
NetBSD is significantly slower than Linux and FreeBSD, but one of the faster systems today.
Also, OpenBSD is very bad for realtime response times, this means that games will stutter heavily even if you have a low spec game on very powerful hardware.