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OpenBSD 6.4 released

openbsd.org

91–100 of 179 posts

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#91

My biggest turnoff with OpenBSD is the more complicated package management if you want to have new versions and security updates beyond the versions packaged with the release. As far as I know you either have to stay on the bleeding edge with -current, build packages yourself, or trust a third party (M:Tier) to build for you, who last I checked were behind on firefox builds. I'd love to someday run it on my laptop th…

You can patch the system and update all binaries with two commands: doas syspatch doas pkg_add -u

As far as I know that will update to the latest packages built for that release, but those are not the latest versions of those packages. OpenBSD doesn't have the resources to rebuild every port as a package for -stable.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#92
post #34
post #13

Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. Damn you Linus...

One thing Linux has going for it is a bunch of popular features for developers' desktops: * Electron apps - VSCode, Atom, Slack, almost every universal desktop app that gets released today. Individual ports of apps to FreeBSD exist, but there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs. * Good desktop virtualization - KVM, VirtualBox (okay FreeBSD has these in theory), VMware * First-class Dock…

> Electron apps... there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs.

This is one of many reasons not to use Electron. Claims of Electron portability are a sham.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#93
I haven't taken the time to write this up, but one of the handy things about OpenBSD is you can take a small 16GB USB stick, format it with one small FAT partition and copy the installer to that. Then you boot the installer on your Ubiquiti Edge Router and install OpenBSD to the unpartitioned space.

With a little work you can have your own caching DNS server including domain blocks for tracking sites and if you want privoxy or a squid proxy. It's also easy to set up your own root CA and switch over to certificate-based authentication for wireless clients as long as the wireless base station supports radius.

I haven't published a tech note on it yet because Android still complains about importing self-signed certificates even when you import the root CA.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means nothing to me. Can you be more specific why /Linux has become a chaotic place to be/.

Not OP, but I will offer my thoughts. Linux is terribly balkanized what with all the competing distros. There are no standards. This is one reason why Linux has not taken off on the desktop outside of tech circles. systemd. It violates almost every *nix tenet out there, especially "a program should do one thing well". It's has a few benefits, but the negatives outweigh these, namely more and more programs outside of…

There is also GNU Shepherd[1] on GuixSD[2], a declarative init system, without systemd's million-plus lines of shitty code[3] and massive scope creep into everything that you can (but probably don't need or want to) do on a computer.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html [3] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#95

I haven't taken the time to write this up, but one of the handy things about OpenBSD is you can take a small 16GB USB stick, format it with one small FAT partition and copy the installer to that. Then you boot the installer on your Ubiquiti Edge Router and install OpenBSD to the unpartitioned space. With a little work you can have your own caching DNS server including domain blocks for tracking sites and if you want…

Can you please post the link once you’ve written it? This sounds really interesting

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#96
post #24
post #13

Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. Damn you Linus...

Is OpenBSD suitable for use on a laptop? I have a Dell Latitute 7370 running KDE Neon, and it runs really well. All hardware is supported, battery life is on-par with Windows, etc. Would OpenBSD work well on this laptop?

I have three laptops, two run OpenBSD, the other one Debian stable. Not sure how well battery utilization compares (don't need battery for more than an hour usually). Both work fine, and from a user-space perspective are very similar (esp. if you automate configuration and dotfiles). OpenBSD is about a magnitude less work to configure, especially if you have a non-trivial network setup (and some things, like IPv6 LLA aliases in /etc/hosts, Debian stable does not even support). If you are reliant on garbage like NetworkManager and Gnome/KDE auto-mounting the story is probably different, but that is just a good opportunity to learn better ways of working on Unix.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#97

I haven't taken the time to write this up, but one of the handy things about OpenBSD is you can take a small 16GB USB stick, format it with one small FAT partition and copy the installer to that. Then you boot the installer on your Ubiquiti Edge Router and install OpenBSD to the unpartitioned space. With a little work you can have your own caching DNS server including domain blocks for tracking sites and if you want…

To be fair: you can do that with probably any unixoid OS. IMHO, it is just much easier with BSDs because a) documentation of how to do it is much easier to access than on linux or the other two(TM) and b) BSDs tend to follow the KISS-principle - meaning: even with the superb documentation one can just read the posix shell scripts to save some time.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#98
post #97

I haven't taken the time to write this up, but one of the handy things about OpenBSD is you can take a small 16GB USB stick, format it with one small FAT partition and copy the installer to that. Then you boot the installer on your Ubiquiti Edge Router and install OpenBSD to the unpartitioned space. With a little work you can have your own caching DNS server including domain blocks for tracking sites and if you want…

To be fair: you can do that with probably any unixoid OS. IMHO, it is just much easier with BSDs because a) documentation of how to do it is much easier to access than on linux or the other two(TM) and b) BSDs tend to follow the KISS-principle - meaning: even with the superb documentation one can just read the posix shell scripts to save some time.

>To be fair: you can do that with probably any unixoid OS

Totally.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#99
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the manpage. One thing I really dislike about modern UNIXes is their lack of decent manpages in place of standins like --help. I love the BSDs and especially OpenBSD for their attention to manpages. It's the main reason why I don't use Linux anymore unless I have to. Adding detailed --help messages would take time away from maintaining manpages, it also presents a duplication of information. If you want to know…

How do you live without docker containers? The fact that docker doesn’t run on BSDs is what drove me away.

...the same way the world has managed to survive for decades without Linux containers in general (let alone specific wrappers around that like Docker is)?

With OpenBSD specifically, you can get 90% of the way there with chroots, standard process isolation, and a bit of shell scripting to handle deployment automation.

Yeah, Docker's cool, but it's really not that hard to run multiple applications/services on the same physical machine while keeping them from clobbering each other or the OS in general (step 1 being to make sure each service/daemon is running under its own minimally-privileged user).

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How well does the inverse works - running VMs in OpenBSD to use Windows, Linux? Is it for example possible to run Virtualbox with good performance in OpenBSD? As far as I know this is not possible. You can always do it with qemu but it wouldn't be practical. If libreoffice is not appropriate for your needs, you may try googledocs inside the browser.

QEMU sounds like a rather heavy way to do it.

I've always thought of qemu as the lightweight way to virtualizea system, but maybe it's just an impression.

Or did you mean that using a VM is a heavy way to try a system out?

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