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
OpenBSD 6.4 released
91–100 of 179 posts
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#92Linux 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…
This is one of many reasons not to use Electron. Claims of Electron portability are a sham.
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#93With 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
#94Earlier 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…
[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
#95I 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…
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#96Linux 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?
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#97I 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…
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#98I 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.
Totally.
Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released
#99Earlier 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.
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
#100Earlier 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.
Or did you mean that using a VM is a heavy way to try a system out?