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…
OpenBSD 7.0
201–210 of 229 posts
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
This depends on the glibc version, but sure, that's a valid difference between the two. edit: and oddly if you only go with this definition, that is Windows with WSL also a Linux OS? I'm guessing most people wouldn't say yes...
WSL2 does include full Linux kernel. I would presume Linux OS to run Linux kernel on host OS. By default Windows runs Windows kernel.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
"My main use for OpenBSD is as a firewall/router, and they frequently make breaking changes to the pf rule syntax so I had to abandon it." Uhm... well, I've been using it since 3.0 (when pf was introduced) and its been very stable. You have at least 6 months to convert your pf and its never taken me more than a day to get it changed. Its well documented and frankly, even with all the horror stories, I've found friend…
I don’t think most people would agree that breaking changes every 6 months fits the definition of “stable” for a firewall.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#204I'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,…
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Coherency, security, stability, ZFS... My only sort of complaint in regards to FreeBSD is actually ZFS. Not that it's not fantastic, or that it shouldn't be there. ZFS does however clearly comes from Solaris, and there have been no effort to make the ZFS command line tools feel more BSD like. Changing the tooling around ZFS probably isn't a great idea, but coherency has clearly taken a backseat to features in this…
It's coherent with the other ZFS implementations in Linux and Solaris.
There's a modest amount of precedent for this kind of thing.
0: lvcreate(1M) from HP-UX 11i https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#2061) For VM Desktop Usage on a laptop 2) Server only.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenBSD has been the OS with the lowest amount of maintenance in my opinion. used it as a webserver and VPN appliance for a couple of years now. only thing in terms of maintenance is the following when a new release is released. pkg_add -u ( i usually update extra packages every 6 months, which is mainly lets encrypt). syspatch sysupgrade reboot: after reboot sysmerge to see if i need to do a config diff. Has been ro…
While sysupgrade is convenient, there's usually some manual steps. Always read the upgrade guide before upgrading.
This release only includes changes related to SNMP, which I imagine are irrelevant to most people, though probably exciting for a subset of OpenBSD users. https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade70.html
The upgrade guide for 6.9 gives a better flavor for how OpenBSD handles and documents subsystem and configuration changes: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html
Notice how succinct and consistent (across decades!) are the upgrade guides. The above have the same basic format and content as this one from 2004: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade35.html I've been doing remote upgrades of OpenBSD and Linux (mostly Debian, but also occasionally Red Hat derivatives) for over 20 years. While I've fortunately only rarely encountered significant problems with any of them, OpenBSD upgrades are the only ones where I can have any confidence in understanding and tracking how the system evolves across upgrades. Follow the upgrade guide and delete outdated files (much easier since sysclean(8)), and a 10-year-old OpenBSD box can have a filesystem as pristine as a freshly installed system.
I'm not one of those people who wants pristine for the sake of pristine. But pristine is important when you care about security, and maintenance burden is a huge component of security, as are simplicity and transparency.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#208I'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?
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.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you cared about actual security, you would use it in a laptop thanks to bioctl and full disk encryption.
Re: OpenBSD 7.0
#210I'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,…
Only if you carefully pick your laptop hardware. I tried giving OpenBSD a spin as a daily driver on my XPS13 9343 and was plagued by issues:
1.) The network firmware is not included in the base OS. I had to download the firmware onto a USB storage device since the XPS doesn't have an ethernet port.
2.) 802.11ac isn't supported on my network card
3.) The login manager and window environment are unusable on a 4k screen. Trying to scale using xrandr --scale caused everything to appear fuzzy. I scoured the @misc mailing archives and could not find a suitable way to scale display without causing blur.
4.) Suspend/resume is broken and causes the kernel to panic.
5.) X.org doesn't use the inteldrm driver by default which causes choppy media playback
6.) OpenBSD puts memory limits on processes by default which causes memory hungry applications -- like web browsers -- to run choppy unless you change the memory limits.
None of these issues came up when using Ubuntu on my XPS 13. On Ubuntu it "just worked".