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OpenBSD 7.0

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Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#121

Post by [deleted] »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #11
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 anyth…

[deleted]

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#122

Post by hackbinary »

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?

If you are looking to dip your toe in and have a tinker with BSD, FreeBSD is probably the best place to start because it has spread of compatibility.

But if you are looking for more focused projects, then Dragonfly for best out of box desktop experience, openbsd for security and firewall, and netbsd for compatibility and portability across loads of devices.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#123

Post by undoware »

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?

My advice? Go with OpenBSD.

These are the folks that brought you the word 'hackathon', and OpenSSH. (Ever use ssh? Thank OpenBSD.)

These are the folks that actually bother to read not just a PR, but actual full codebases, just to make sure their pointers don't dangle.

It's been years since the DevOps space was first told to prefer 'livestock' -- disposable, nearly-identical instances -- to pets -- long-lived customized instances and servers -- but as every farmer knows, if you have lots of sheep, the job is a lot easier if you have a sheepdog. Not quite a pet, but not cattle, either.

OpenBSD is my sheepdog. It keeps my git repos, it runs my wireguard VPN, and it, above all the other systems I touch, is trusted.

But trust is ultimately about people, not about systems. Systems get their trusthworthiness from their creators, the way the moon gets light from the sun.

And in trustworthiness, the OpenBSD community has a breathtaking superpower: They can say no. They are good at saying no. Do you know how hard that is -- to have someone ask for a feature, and just tell them off? That's the hardest thing any manager ever has to do, and these guys are good at it. Rare, in FOSS space.

These are the folks that are so good at saying 'no' that they ship with a literal actual bespoke copy of 'vi', that does exactly what it is supposed to, does not take packages, and also does not have a package manager pulling in raw github HEADs. (I love you, neovim, but you are so trusting!)

OpenBSD has been around for most of my 20+ career in this industry and it's sort of always been this aggressively reliable paperweight of a distro. I'm never quite sure what to do with it (NixOS is my go-to for my workstations -- NixOS + Wayland + Sway + Alacritty + Neovim is as close to godliness as a user interface can come) but OpenBSD finds its uses, and in those uses, it is smooth and heavy and reliable, making it the perfect foil for the rest of my infra: For where NixOS is neurotic and brittle, OpenBSD is saturnine and malleable.

I think of my infra as sort of being like a knife blade, with a glittering Nixos/Wayland/Neovim edge supported by a soft, heavy core of OpenBSD.

If everything else breaks, so long as I have my OpenBSD instances, I can recover.

One final word: At my end, I just finished upgrading my instance at openbsd.amsterdam; big shoutout to that amazing team for their incredible support. (Mischa, in particular, is a force of nature, and I am fan. ;D)

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#124

Post by snvzz »

puffyn wrote: post #101
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 s…

>basic surfing

With recent versions of chrome/firefox and 3d acceleration on amd/intel graphics, you're not limited to "basic surfing".

The only reason I can think of that you would say that is that perhaps you do e.g. have an NVIDIA card (why...) and thus you're stuck with no accelerated graphics.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#125

Post by proxysna »

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?

If you are looking for a great server system give Omnios/Smartos and other Illumos distributions a try. Rock solid, well engineered and legitimately fun to tinker with. OpenIndiana is the desktop option, heard a lot, but i have no experience myself.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#126

Post by stiray »

dijit wrote: post #99
stiray wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reason for my switch was that some key things (for me) were designed in a way that seemed more right that on linux and this is totally subjective opinion. I am still running ubuntu on laptop and will switch when the next install is a thing, but I am running freebsd on server for years now and while i tremble on each update for the laptop, I dont for freebsd, even when updating from 12.x to 13.x. Based on years of exp…

Not to be that guy, but your Linux complaints sound like systemd complaints. Not sure the teething process has finished there, but I share the sentiment.

Naah, systemd is not bothering me at all, i dont have issues if they change the way how resolve information is stored.

What bothers me that the old way is still there (/etc/resolv.conf) while it is being generated by systemd. I can accept the change where the dns information is stored. Fine, it is no longer the same file, I dont care. While on the other side, if I get parallel mechanism, that is keeping the old, this is really an annoyance. That is hard to identify.

The ZFS has nothing to do with systemd and I havent even touched stuff like jails/lxc, byhve/kvm, memory consumption, quality of code,... as I have said it, it is subjective and it is about trust into operating system. Linux distributions dont have it. They blew it just too many times. BSD didnt.

It is hard to be objective there, just try the BSD. And please do report your findings.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#128

Post by Datagenerator »

epitactic wrote: post #117
Enginerrrd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ESXi (free version), it works well though if I had to do it again from scratch today, I'd probably go with KVM

Tried Proxmox?

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#129

Post by amatecha »

johnisgood wrote: post #118
epitactic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why did you choose DragonflyBSD for the game server vs. another BSD?

Also, which games? curious what is easily hosted on BSD :)

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#130

Post by Datagenerator »

undoware wrote: post #123
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?

My advice? Go with OpenBSD. These are the folks that brought you the word 'hackathon', and OpenSSH. (Ever use ssh? Thank OpenBSD.) These are the folks that actually bother to read not just a PR, but actual full codebases, just to make sure their pointers don't dangle. It's been years since the DevOps space was first told to prefer 'livestock' -- disposable, nearly-identical instances -- to pets -- long-lived customiz…

Thank you for writing this. Analogous to spinning wheels, the outside rotating very fast ( NixOS/Arch) and near the stable center we have several BSD's. FreeBSD for the excellent ZFS, OpenBSD for vital network functions, Wireguard etc.

Cheers, happy donations to the BSD Foundation!

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