11–20 of 107 posts
It does just work (TM). Brightness and volume hotkeys work out of the box, without a desktop environment (even on the console). WiFi, including autojoining, works using a single ifconfig command or configuration file. Suspend/resume works on my laptop without any configuration. If you’re using it on a laptop, just make sure to use an older, less ultrabook-like machine and you’ll be good.
I found OpenBSD to be pretty amazing, and after trying it now and then I finally loaded it onto my x220 to use it daily. Things worked fine, but I realized the battery life was poor (even using the functionality, I think in tpm, which regulates the clock speed to be slower) and support for what I began to need (like the Eclipse IDE) was shoddy. Unlike many others, I don't have much to say about the documentation, but…
Many of the items on this list seem to be some variation of "random place in memory so attackers can't guess" It sounds nice, but can someone explain if there are any downsides?
Slightly slower? Mechanical hard drive boot times aren’t the best, but they’re quite acceptable with an SSD. For my desktop use, OpenBSD seems plenty fast.
Edit: To answer GP's question, you're probably already incurring a cache miss if you're pointer chasing so in most cases there should be no effect on performance.
What are the desktop GUI environments or window managers available on OpenBSD that are comparable to those on Linux? I see a mention of running X as a user, but nothing more. What about desktop hardware support? Does it have working drivers for different WiFi chipsets, video cards, trackpad, etc. (referring only to x86 based systems)?
I'll answer this honestly;
All of the X11 based ones until SystemD and wayland came about are essentially supported or working. Gnome created a hard dependency on systemd and thus can't be used any longer on openbsd.
Wayland (and thus; Sway) is not supported by OpenBSD.
But i3, xmonad, KDE4, XFCE4 and cwm are all running flawlessly and I used them before on OpenBSD myself.
I think even Budgie works, but I've not tried that myself.
> What about desktop hardware support?
Hardware support is obviously up to whatever you have. I can only share my experiences and I had a thinkpad x201. Which was obviously very well supported.
However there is a caveat to that: the drivers were indeed supporting the hardware very well BUT OpenBSD does not support bluetooth in any form (citing the fact that bluetooth is a horrible standard and implementing it simply; has never been done and would be hard/impossible).
WiFi was relegated to 802.11g (not 802.11n despite my hardware supporting it). Support for N was added a couple of years ago (after it had been widely adopted for more than half a decade by other OS's) I wouldn't hold my breath for AC support given that.
How many of these items are not also available in a standard Linux configuration?
* LibreSSL (most Linux distros use OpenSSL, YMMV)
* License (GPL, GPL everywhere)
* PID randomization
* Priv sep (for some package managers, for example)
* Swap encryption (probably opt-in, so not default)
* UTF-8 only
* W^X Memory
* autoinstall (though ansible and co. might help)
* base system (it's GNU/Linux after all, not just GNU nor Linux -- some outliers)
* doas(1) (yeah, sudo(1) was made in OpenBSD, but they ditched it)
* pf (http://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5)
* pledge
* signify (most distros use GnuPG instead) (though porting it should be a breeze)
* unveil
Unveil, pledge, and co. probably have AppArmor/SELinux counterparts, but adding layer upon layer make the whole thing brittle. Unveil, pledge, etc. are built-into all base utils (see also base system concept)
And that's good?
There must have been a regression. There still was lingering suid root binaries that OpenBSD got bit by recently.
I mean, it was security fix #1 for release 6.4: https://www.openbsd.org/errata64.html
It does just work (TM). Brightness and volume hotkeys work out of the box, without a desktop environment (even on the console). WiFi, including autojoining, works using a single ifconfig command or configuration file. Suspend/resume works on my laptop without any configuration. If you’re using it on a laptop, just make sure to use an older, less ultrabook-like machine and you’ll be good.
If you're willing to use old hardware for compatibility, any of the major *nix flavors just work.
Guess I'll need to submit a merge request.