I have some not great memories of trying to use it through 5.x back when there was no binary package manager. A lot of stuff wouldn't compile easily or segfaulted easily even on x86, but it was a long time ago and I was a noob at unix let alone fixing compilation issues, so I never really knew if it was my incompetence or NetBSD. Either way it was definitely harder back then without binary packages... I remember thinking at the time: what's the point on being able to run on old hardware if it takes a month to compile the stuff you need.
Yah... I ran NetBSD-1.1 and then followed current for awhile from source on little machines-- first a 486, then a Pentium and a SPARC 1+. It was clean and wonderful.
I just dug the Pentium of my late childhood out of the closet and figured I'd play DOS games and install recent NetBSD. But GENERIC is too big even with the reasonable maximum 64MB of RAM (most Pentiums cannot cache more than 64MB) to do anything but crawl, and compiling a kernel takes about 15 hours on a Pentium 120... and sure, I could build on another machine, but is it even Unix anymore if it's not self-hosting?
Sure.... my whole comment is about slimming down the kernel and cross-compiling not feeling authentic. If you can't really self-host, what's the point?
Now with 9.2 people is telling me is working really great as in the old days.