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OpenBSD for Linux Users

openbsdhandbook.com

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Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#21

Post by cylinder714 »

toyg wrote: post #12
ianai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’d probably help if it had a company like Red Hat offering enterprise support and contributing back to it. Knowledge certification helps a ton too. It’s all fun and games until the SME leaves and a company finds out how hard it is to hire another person with skills in that OS.

It'd probably help also if they could find a killer-app role. Currently it's a decent OS only for low-level devices like routers and firewalls, which are a fairly small part of the computing ecosystem (and even there, it has lost a lot of ground to OSes that exploit multithreading better, hence giving faster throughput). As an application-development platform there are roadblocks at every turn and no real use-case. T…

>a decent OS only for low-level devices

Why do people insist on smearing OpenBSD like this? My 2011 ThinkPads run Firefox and LibreOffice just fine. It's not as polished as Fedora, sure, but I never have to reinstall after upgrading trashes grub, which happened to me earlier this year.

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#22

Post by ainar-g »

One command that I've used a lot that's missing is:

  pkg_info -Q str
It allows searching for packages with substring str in their name. Very useful when you want to see, which additional packages are available for a thing, for examlpe:

  pkg_info -Q xfce

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#23

Post by corette »

flatiron wrote: post #8
LoganDark wrote: post #4

It looks like this page isn't quite finished yet, but it looks promising! I may want to try OpenBSD one of these days. I have at least one friend who loves it and constantly tells me about how cool it is compared to Linux.

It’s great for specific applications but you would be hard pressed to say it’s a better desktop OS than a gnu Linux distro. Bluetooth is a pretty hard thing to miss.

If you value simplicity, it's far better than Linux. Many people use it because they like simple things that just work and can be easily fixed when they fail.

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#24

Post by volkadav »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20
lizknope wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss seeing Sun SPARCstations boot. The Sun logo and the black text on white screen was always cool to me. https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparcboot.jpg

That link doesn't work for me, it looks like they prevent hot linking images

For what it's worth, appears to be from this page: https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparc.htm

Agreed that the old Sun hardware was pretty classy. :) They went through a number of different boot logos: https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos (I think my favorite was the CG6 framebuffer one, though I'm probably dating myself quite a bit with that opinion, haha).

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#26

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

LoganDark wrote: post #4

It looks like this page isn't quite finished yet, but it looks promising! I may want to try OpenBSD one of these days. I have at least one friend who loves it and constantly tells me about how cool it is compared to Linux.

It all depends on what you want to do/how you want to use your PC.

I use OBSD on _ALL_ of my edge devices. I use FBSD on all of my internal servers.

I have used OBSD as a desktop PC. I currently use FBSD as my desktop PC.

You can use OBSD and still get a full GUI with a web browser. But (for example) you need to attend ZOOM meetings with a working webcam, and interact with MS Teams whiteboards; you are going to get frustrated.

So you need to be honest with yourself about what exactly you want to do.

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#27

Post by Koshkin »

fsckwtfsck wrote: post #16

Hopefully it covers the weird questions about inodes and links the kernel asks you when doing a dirty reboot after a crash (OpenBSD does not have a journaling file system, so you better get ready for those questions asking if inode 1823791277 in /var does this or that, or perhaps just press 'y' repeatedly and pray). It's perhaps a positive point if you're a boomer and miss the excitement of 1980s UNIX.

How frequent are crashes though? I would think, more often the user could just accidentally pull the power plug without a proper shutdown.

Re: OpenBSD for Linux Users

#29

Post by Kwpolska »

LoganDark wrote: post #9
flatiron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s great for specific applications but you would be hard pressed to say it’s a better desktop OS than a gnu Linux distro. Bluetooth is a pretty hard thing to miss.

I don't use Bluetooth. I even use my DualSense controller wired. A true UNIX is hard to beat. I grew up with macOS and was devastated when my Mac broke & couldn't afford a new one. Been despising Windows for the past ~1.5 years. OpenBSD is nothing like macOS, but it is still UNIX.

Did you consider Linux? While it isn't Unix certified, it's still Unix-like, and is quite usable as a desktop (YMMV of course).
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