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OpenBSD 7.0

openbsd.org

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Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#11

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

nanna wrote: post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

I love OpenBSD because it is as close to "just works" as it gets in an ideal world. I love using it for my personal website because it is very easy to get a proper overview over the OS as a whole and because it comes with some of my favourite pieces of software and all I need for a personal website is part of the system: httpd, pf etc. Also OpenBSD has some of the best docs out there, I rarely need to websearch anything.

Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, so I rarely get to spin up OpenBSD outside of that due to a number of reasons like a lack of filesystems for interoperability (USB media) and firmware drivers (got to be specific in the hardware you buy for it).

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#13

Post by tbrock »

pastrami_panda wrote: post #10
Koshkin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coherency, security, stability, ZFS... Perfect on a server (e.g. a VPS), may not be as good as a desktop or as something to run on a laptop (depending on hardware).

> Coherency What does this refer to in this context?

Things are where you’d expect, patterns and conventions cary on throughout the system, etc… Vs the disjoint feeling linux has.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#14

Post by waynesonfire »

nanna wrote: post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

Im a life long linux user and decided to use FreeBSD as a platform for my most recent hobby project. It was surpising how enlightening it was to use a different tool. It does somethings the same way, somethings different, what was most pleasant was discovering the things it did better. I don't think you can read about it, really worth experiencing this.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#15

Post by gigatexal »

nanna wrote: post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

This link is for OpenBSD but I have the most experience with FreeBSD. Reasons to try out a BSD, even FreeBSD:

1. ZFS -- by far and away the best filesystem there is. (A hella partisan take but try it out and you'll likely fall in love like the rest of us did)

2. The handbook. The handbook is gold. It's up there with some of the best documentation available.

3. Less fragmentation. The BSDs have 3 main derivatives: NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. (There are others but these are the main)

4. If you like LXD then you'll love Jails.

5. The BSD license. (If being the most free means something to you. I kind of like it but maybe this isn't a selling point.)

6. Can be rolling or used in an LTS fashion. It's rather easy to track -current all the time or just stick with a stable release and do periodic binary package updates.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#16

Post by yrui »

nanna wrote: post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

I've been running OpenBSD more than 15 years, and it does have a learning curve.

One area to consider as a happy Debian desktop user is using OpenBSD as a router OS. PC Engines (I have no affiliation to them) makes a very nice router called "Alix" and OpenBSD works well on it. Previously, people were installing it on Soekris routers before they went out of business.

OpenBSD's firewall pf is by far my favorite, and it and OpenBSD have a lot of nice networking features and tools to tinker with. It's free of blobs (in the default install), free of known bugs (in the default install--but generally your router will work well with only the default install), and configured to be reasonably secure by default. The documentation is also frequently praised.

How many other modern, full-fledged, well-maintained and open code OSes run in 32 Mb of RAM?

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#18

Post by ksec »

jmclnx wrote: post #17

Just see this: https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html But if your video is Nvidia, you are out of luck until they open their drivers.

From https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html

>Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.

Someone has the wisdom to put this in nearly 20 years ago.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#19

Post by JoshTriplett »

tbrock wrote: post #13
pastrami_panda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coherency What does this refer to in this context?

Things are where you’d expect, patterns and conventions cary on throughout the system, etc… Vs the disjoint feeling linux has.

Part of the job of a Linux distribution is to provide policy, conventions, and similar consistency.

If you install everything from sources directly, or directly from upstream vendors, you may get inconsistencies, but if you install everything from your Linux distribution, you should get reasonable consistency, just as if you install everything from your BSD distribution.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#20

Post by upofadown »

nanna wrote: post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

I don't care that much about the security claims but I have to acknowledge that they are probably true to some extent. I value OpenBSD most for its minimalism. The OpenBSD project seems to have managed to avoid the feature bloat that other systems are now suffering from. You have to learn it, but there is not a lot there to learn.

Once you figure out how to set it up then the audio just works. That is a killer feature compared to the situation I had to deal with when I was doing Debian on the desktop.

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