I only ask this question because newsnews mentioned that they released new "anti-flamewar" features recently:
I am generally familiar with CentOS / RHEL, and mostly like the way of doing things on there. I am particularly grateful for the package manager, and being able to add repositories to lots of software as needed, including cutting-edge up to date stuff.
How does NetBSD compare to something like CentOS? I realize they are different kernels, but that's about where my understanding seems to end. Why would I want to use one or the other?
They're about as drastically different as major free Unices can be.
The BSDs are the reference standard for add-on package management. In the RedHat 5 days (a decade before RHEL 5, mind you) the BSDs had a huge third party software library available using either the ports tree to compile from source or using "pkg" files precompiled from the same source base and available for download from the distribution FTP sites.
The BSD package management platform doesn't really address OS upgrades, which has been a weakness for me when considering it for business use. The preferred method of upgrading for a long time was to check the code base out and recompile it periodically. FWIW this doesn't have the Gentoo stigma -- it's not done for the optimizations, it was simply the most pragmatic way to distribute updates to large systems over the small network links of the time (you can easily maintain an up to date system over a dialup modem if you've installed it some other way).
NetBSD specifically has a focus on running on as many architectures as possible. This isn't a big win for you perhaps, but it makes the OS suitable for installation on embedded devices. The NetBSD distribution tends to be fairly small, which also plays well into running on modest devices.
Why would I want to use one or the other?
I would suggest selecting one and giving it an honest assessment for six or so months, trying to use it daily for the same things you use Linux for. Linux has overwhelming developer and industrial inertia behind it, so you may well find that you prefer CentOS, but it will broaden your horizons, particularly around the edges -- firewalls, RAID, kernels, package management, and so on.
You might also do the same thing for Solaris 10 (particularly not OpenSolaris first). It's a really interesting mix of some legacy stuff (a miserable default shell) and some advanced new features (dtrace, zfs, smf).
I am generally familiar with CentOS / RHEL, and mostly like the way of doing things on there. I am particularly grateful for the package manager, and being able to add repositories to lots of software as needed, including cutting-edge up to date stuff.
How does NetBSD compare to something like CentOS? I realize they are different kernels, but that's about where my understanding seems to end. Why would I want to use one or the other?