alt Hacker News> NOTICE: The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux. You cannot necessarily expect AlpineBSD to work on any random computer you have lying around.
Huh. I feel like the author has their BSDs mixed up! NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything, even lots of platforms no longer supported by mainstream Linux distributions. The page links to the laptop wiki, which is about AMD64 laptops and their finicky peripherals and driver support. A better place to start for hardware support is https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/.
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Depends on what you mean with "it runs". Does it boot? Probably. Can you use your WiFi adapter or graphics card? Probably not
As a NetBSD developer, I wouldn't claim that it works on everything.
That was true 20 years ago, but not really today. Today's hardware is much more complicated and I wouldn't expect NetBSD to work well on anything but the most basic hardware.
"runs on practically everything" I take to mean the main CPU and general machine architecture, not every possible peripheral driver one might need.
The impression I get is that NetBSD has just enough code to get it up and running on a machine but there is not enough development and testing to get it to run well on a machine.