I remember the fight. My wife stood in the doorway of the home office, arms crossed, while I was bent over a server rack that hummed with the pride of a perfectly compiled NetBSD kernel. “Are you really going to spend another Saturday on that thing?” she asked. The kids were in the other room. The ISP was barely keeping up. And I was defending a choice that, on paper, made perfect sense.
Let me tell you what most tech articles won’t: the hidden cost of loving your technology too much isn’t a performance hit or a bug. It’s the look on your partner’s face when they realize your hobby isn’t just a hobby—it’s a priority that competes with them.
In 2005, I ran a small ISP. I had a choice. I could use FreeBSD, Debian, or even the then-new Ubuntu. But I chose NetBSD. Why? Because NetBSD was pure. It ran on everything. The code was clean, the design was elegant, and the community was full of people who genuinely cared about portability and correctness. It was the right choice.
Except it wasn’t.
“The best code in the world is worthless if it makes the people you love hate you.”
NetBSD during peak hours handled 35 requests per minute. That’s abysmal, even for 2005. The performance wasn’t NetBSD’s fault—it was a terrible application stack. But try explaining that to your wife when she asks why the internet is slow. Try explaining technical debt to a family that just wants Netflix to work.
And the arguments piled up. One commenter on the original mailing list post noted the subtlety of the closing parenthesis: “This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things… ;)” — a joke that lands because it’s achingly true. The parentheses are a quiet confession: the cost of technical purity is often measured in domestic peace.
This is the part of the story that rarely gets told. We celebrate the hobbyist who builds a home lab out of salvaged hardware, who runs a niche OS because it’s beautiful, who spends weekends tweaking kernel parameters. But we don’t talk about the partner who sits alone, or the kids who ask why Dad is always on the computer.
I’m not here to tell you to abandon your passion. I’m here to tell you that neutrality kills relationships—and I’m taking a side: the best technology is the one that works for your whole life, not just your server room. The operating system that costs you your marriage is a bad operating system, no matter how clean the code.
Did I switch? No. I stuck with NetBSD for years. I defended it. I loved it. But I also learned to close the server room door earlier, to watch the clock, to choose an after-dinner project over a kernel upgrade. The lesson isn’t that NetBSD is bad. It’s that the most important benchmark isn’t performance—it’s whether the people you love still want to talk to you at the end of the day.
I don’t regret the choice. I learned from it. The twist is that the real tension wasn’t technical—it was emotional. And the only way to win that game is to remember that your technology serves your life, not the other way around.
FAQ
Q: Was the author wrong to choose NetBSD?
A: No, but the author's mistake was prioritizing technical purity over practical performance and family life. The OS wasn't wrong—the context was.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for someone building a home server today?
A: Choose the OS that balances your passion with your life. If your family suffers from downtime or your time spent tinkering, it's a bad trade. Consider stability, support, and ease of use for everyone involved.
Q: Isn't this just a 'get off my lawn' nostalgia piece?
A: No. The core lesson—that niche tech choices have social and emotional costs—applies today more than ever. From smart home ecosystems to custom Linux builds, the same tension exists. The tools we choose shape our relationships.