What makes NetBSD special?

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

I hope that this question is not off topic in this list. I thought of 
writing on the netbsd-advocacy list, but that list appears to be mostly 
dead.

Anyway, I think I have a reasonable idea of how "BSD" compares with 
Linux, thanks to this great article:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01


So that's not what I'm here for. What I wish for is a comparison between 
NetBSD and other BSD's. In particular FreeBSD since that is the more 
popular one. I spent some time googling for a comparison, but I couldn't 
find anything with a lot of substance. Yes, I know that NetBSD runs on 
anything from a toaster upward and FreeBSD is supposed to be very fast. 
Neither of these is a major issue for me, I only have an x86 and my 2 
year-old laptop is fast enough for me.

So, what I'm looking for is the difference in actual usage. For example, 
I spent this weekend running NetBSD and FreeBBSD under emulation. I 
noticed that I like NetBSD's "pkgin" much better than pkg_add; maybe it 
reminds me of apt-get. But FreeBSD has more packages. In particular, 
FreeBSD has Chromium which is my favourite browser, but presumably 
NetBSD will have it "soon" (it is currently in pkgsrc-wip).

Other than pkgin and chromium, I haven't yet seen much of a difference. 
I had to put in a similar amount of effort to get each one setup.


What I use my computer for:

 - Desktop / workstation.
 - Science (astrophysics): LaTeX, Perl, GCC, GFortran.
 - General: Gnome, Chromium, Thunderbird.

I think that covers me as a first-order approximation. So, for instance, 
I won't be interested in server features or deployment.


Based on this, do you have any thoughts to share about what makes NetBSD 
different from other BSDs?


Thanks for the help.

Cheers,
Daniel.
--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.