That's a very limited view of what portability means.
Driver support for a niche SoC? Good luck getting NetBSD on before Linux. The sheer amount of SoCs supported by the Linux kernel dwarfs anything NetBSD has to offer.
Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.
Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?
Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.
Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?