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OpenBSD 7.0

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Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#101

Post by puffyn »

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 can only comment on OpenBSD. It’s a minimal unix system. I like the minimalism. OpenBSD is mainly a router/server/firewall system but you can use OpenBSD on a desktop. If your hardware is supported everything works out of the box. Firefox/Chromium have pledge/unveil security which prevent them from accessing your file system. Something like apparmor but works put of the box. However it’s not designed as a desktop system (installing a browser introduces many security risks). They have some additional security features like encrypted swap and others. In terms of security, the OpenBSD kernel is a lot smaller than the linux kernel. Can’t have holes in code that doesn’t exist. All together it’s just a minimal small unix system.

If you want to use it on the desktop, you can use it for basic surfing or 90s video games. I’m using it for fun mainly. There is no jails / docker / virtualbox so I don’t use it for coding.

OpenBSD isn’t really a desktop OS, desktop users typically use FreeBSD because there are many more packages. FreeBSD is a completely different OS.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#102

Post by messe »

ink_13 wrote: post #93
mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

IME it depends on your use case. If you want something you can use as a border router/firewall, OpenBSD. If you want something for more general-purpose computing (like a desktop or home server), FreeBSD. If you want something you can install on your toaster, NetBSD.

I think this is a bit limiting. FreeBSD's networking performance can be significantly higher than OpenBSD's (although IMO OpenBSD's pf has nicer syntax), so it's a great firewall choice.

Similarly, on desktop, OpenBSD can be pretty nice if you're a developer comfortable in the terminal; it runs the same graphics drivers as FreeBSD and Linux (other than NVIDIA). It's defaults tend to be a bit more sensible on desktop/laptops too IMO as its developers are more likely to dogfood it. There's been good progress on NetBSD desktops over the past few years as well, but I'm less familiar with it, so I can't comment too much.

With regards to portability, NetBSD supports more systems, but often I've found that OpenBSD is a little bit more stable on the ones they do support as they insist on not using cross compilation: so every system they do support is at least stable enough to build itself, which is a good stress test, especially on older machines.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#103

Post by bluejekyll »

mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

This isn’t all that different from choosing the Linux OS of choice. That decision often is partnered with the package manager that’s desired, and how quickly things are upstreamed in it. Do you want apt, nix, yum/rpm? Then how stable do you want it? Debian, Ubuntu, etc? How much support are you looking for? Redhat, etc.

I guess I don’t see a major difference in the complexity of that decision process in the Linux space, which might have been alluded to.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#104

Post by foodstances »

mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

They all feel different, I would encourage you to install each in a VM and play around and see which one you like the best.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#105

Post by epitactic »

mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

This is why I've setup my homelab with a hypervisor, you don't have to choose and can run each of these operating systems, for specific purposes they are best suited for. This is what I do:

OpenIndiana: file server (ZFS)

OpenBSD: firewall, router, network services (DHCP, DNS, NAT)

DragonflyBSD: game server

FreeBSD: other general application services

I haven't found a personal use case for NetBSD yet, though I would like to (it is great for embedded systems).

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#106

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

bluejekyll wrote: post #103
mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

This isn’t all that different from choosing the Linux OS of choice. That decision often is partnered with the package manager that’s desired, and how quickly things are upstreamed in it. Do you want apt, nix, yum/rpm? Then how stable do you want it? Debian, Ubuntu, etc? How much support are you looking for? Redhat, etc. I guess I don’t see a major difference in the complexity of that decision process in the Linux spa…

Most Linux distributions are much more similar to each other than BSDs are. At least that's my impression after spending the last month at work porting a bunch of scripts from Linux to several BSDs (Free, Open, and Net). The differences are too many to describe here, from where they install third party libraries, to configuration file locations and formats, to how basic tools work (essential things like grep/sed/awk have (sometimes very) different feature sets, flags, and runtime characteristics (for example, how exactly do they handle signals)). Default shells are also very different, though that's a pretty minor thing.

If you compare something like Debian, Alpine, and NixOS, then maybe..

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#107

Post by Enginerrrd »

epitactic wrote: post #105
mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

This is why I've setup my homelab with a hypervisor, you don't have to choose and can run each of these operating systems, for specific purposes they are best suited for. This is what I do: OpenIndiana: file server (ZFS) OpenBSD: firewall, router, network services (DHCP, DNS, NAT) DragonflyBSD: game server FreeBSD: other general application services I haven't found a personal use case for NetBSD yet, though I would l…

Which hypervisor are you using for that? I used to run Xen for a similar purpose, but I ended up just running normal debian with a bunch of lxc containers instead after dealing with some Xen issues that were difficult to unravel.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#108

Post by bluedino »

deltarholamda wrote: post #92
yung_steezy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend FreeBSD if you were going to try one of them. The BSD experience a bit like using linux was like 15 years ago. Online DRM for sites like Netflix will not work for example. Specifically in the case of FreeBSD the filesystem is well curated and cohesive, if you feel a file ought to be in a certain location it is usually there. Additionally the manpages and docs are a joy to read. I'm less familiar wit…

>prioritising being a cohesive operating system and docs This is one of the areas where OpenBSD really shines. Their documentation is really good. FreeBSD is also quite good, but I've been consistently impressed with OpenBSD's docs since 2.5. Linux distros can't reach the same level of quality due to being less cohesive at the base, though they do make up for it with quantity. You can search for most Linux issues and…

Arch was the most BSD-ish when I tried it a few years back

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#109

Post by petre »

chasil wrote: post #91
yabones wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely true. The idea is that `ksh` is good enough , and the extra features of bash are extraneous or unnecessary, making it an add-on rather than a core feature. It's an interesting idea, and while I feel bash is absolutely 'good enough' to be part of the base system, I wouldn't want zsh or fish part of my base system - so it's then a matter of opinion whose shell is bloat and whose is essential. So I respe…

Another issue is size. This is what I see on CentOS: $ ls -l /bin/bash /bin/dash /bin/mksh -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 964536 Nov 22 2019 /bin/bash -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 113536 Nov 5 2018 /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 296192 Jan 27 2018 /bin/mksh The Debian Almquist shell has nearly nothing beyond POSIX (I believe that local function variables are the only extension). This is the Ubuntu system shell, and it tolerat…

> Apple has switched from bash to zsh. I don't know the motivations for this

GPLv3 vs BSD or MIT license. I lived zsh anyway, switched some of my BSD shells to it afterwards.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#110

Post by anthk »

bluejekyll wrote: post #103
mirekrusin wrote: post #90

I'd love to try but I'm experiencing hardcore option paralysis every time I start thinking about it. FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD – _that_ is the question. Wait, maybe DragonFly actually? illumos? ...wait, I mean OpenIndiana, I think... wait, what's OmniOS? Is Darwin a thing, like I could just have BSD and macOS for free or something?

This isn’t all that different from choosing the Linux OS of choice. That decision often is partnered with the package manager that’s desired, and how quickly things are upstreamed in it. Do you want apt, nix, yum/rpm? Then how stable do you want it? Debian, Ubuntu, etc? How much support are you looking for? Redhat, etc. I guess I don’t see a major difference in the complexity of that decision process in the Linux spa…

Not even close. Each BSD is it's own OS.
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