Comment by wrx100

Last time I used NetBSD I was building my own packages (and the OS itself) from source (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html). This was encouraged at the time. You could tweak them with various options and also contribute to the effort (https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/).

I did install pkgsrc on Ubuntu to get around snap but building anything took such a long time even on modern hardware. But that was building all the dependencies from scratch. After that it should take less time.