141–150 of 229 posts
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?
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…
(Having said that, my needs might be atypical.)
Edit/ps: last I knew, it had something like 10_000 binary packages available, in addition to the base system.
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?
OpenBSD for laptops, VM guests, and VPSs. It has a very coherent userland, and the devs dogfood heavily, my go-to for anything I have to actually administer. FreeBSD for servers and NAS, desktop. FreeBSD has high performance all around, ZFS, jails, bhyve, linux compatability, etc. But it's not as nice to administer as OpenBSD. I want to love it, but it's tedious. NetBSD is an OK choice for anything, and very capable,…
I would personally never use it for a laptop.
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What simple text file is, for example, the list of WiFi SSIDs to try to connect to stored in?
/etc/systemd/network/25-wireless.network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-networkd#network_fi... But simple i would not call it...compared to bsd ;)
The vast majority of users control wpa_supplicant indirectly through NetworkManager, so it's not widely known that it can be configured using simple text files. But it can! On Arch linux, the default config file location (for network card wlan0) is: /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf.
iwd is similarly straightforward to configure using text files. Using the CLI front-end is typically a nicer experience, since you get to pick the SSID from scan results and you get quick feedback if you mess up the password. But if you want to do it manually, just create one file per wifi network (containing SSID, password, etc) in /var/lib/iwd/.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenBSD for laptops, VM guests, and VPSs. It has a very coherent userland, and the devs dogfood heavily, my go-to for anything I have to actually administer. FreeBSD for servers and NAS, desktop. FreeBSD has high performance all around, ZFS, jails, bhyve, linux compatability, etc. But it's not as nice to administer as OpenBSD. I want to love it, but it's tedious. NetBSD is an OK choice for anything, and very capable,…
Openbsd has consistently scored towards the bottom in all performance benchmarks that I've seen in the last few years, when compared to FreeBSD and various linuxen. I would personally never use it for a laptop.
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…
However when I ran OpenBSD on an old Chromebook I did really enjoy using it, I made a point of trying to use just the base system and aside from needing a web browser it was extremely usable. The documentation is universally good all the built in tools are well maintained. In the near future I’m gonna setup a separate firewall/router machine from my NixOS box and I think I’m going to use OpenBSD there too.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recommend giving OpenBSD a try over the others. It's just... a clean OS, and the base system is extremely well documented; to the point that I think it's the only OS you can learn inside out without ever using Google. OpenBSD might not be the best choice for any given use, but it's so remarkably consistent and understandable that I think everyone interested in alternative OSes should try it out at least once.
I don't want a OS where I have to read man pages and documentation to get around. The whole self documentation excuse is the same reason why Emacs is slowly losing market share. People want software that is intuitive, and failing that, have all answers available on their favorite search engine. Short of baking a chatbot or search engine into OpenBSD, relying purely on self documentation is not sustainable. Though the…
I can’t believe this is free. Glad I support the BSDs with the pittance every month that I can but wow amazing work.
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cli programs, they all have different ways to handle arguments, options, help ps: another instance, albeit not a BSD strength either, would be data format, every output is different, I, like a few people too wanted some json as pivot representation to cut the thousands of papercuts, that kind of uniformity is what I expect from "system"
Lots (just some? most? I haven't really used it much) of FreeBSD system utilities are using libxo for output, so you can use e.g. ps --libxo json and get json output, or xml/html