One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.
Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.
As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.
Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.
Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.
As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.
Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.