> Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.
I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.
I had Arch installed on my RPi2s, but I didn’t like the need to update the RPi that frequently, wearing off the SD card. And later on, it became unsupported by Arch ARM. Now I use DietPi, and it’s my favourite Linux distribution (for an SBC server) so far. It has very small number of processes running too). So that’s why I’m curious whether it would be much different with NetBSD.
I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.