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Why use OpenBSD?

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Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#3
Servers I setup in openbsd just keep working, and are an easy patch/upgrade process. Servers I setup in Ubuntu break and have weird patching issues. Maybe it's something I'm doing, but I sure do like that OpenBSD seems a lot easier to just have solid and work indefinitely.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#5
I appreciate that OpenBSD sold its course on security-everywhere.

Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants. There are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing, or years before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux outperformed their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick" strategy. But one of the key issues I had was this:

I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I went out of my apartment and returned hours later. Well, the FreeBSD machine was no longer running; my linux machine on the other hand is running non-stop for months, literally. This may be a fluke, perhaps the computer had a problem - I am not saying this is really what the BSDs are all about, as I also had them installed before. But then I also asked myself "why would I want to bother with the BSDs, if Linux simply runs better?". And I haven't found a good, convincing answer to that for me to rationalise why I'd still be using the BSDs. Note: I also use Linux in a non-standard way, e. g. versioned AppDirs, but essentially Linux is simply more flexible than the BSDs (that is my opinion) and there are more users too. There will be always some BSD users, but to me they are like a dying breed. They would need to market themselves as a "runs outside the nerd bubble as well"; even Linux is still stuck in its own nerd bubble. You have to break out of it if you want to really dominate (Linux semi-does it indirectly, e. g. we can count many smartphones as Linux-driven, but I am still using a desktop computer system here, so to me this is what really counts, even if the total number is less than the smartphone users numbers).

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#6

Servers I setup in openbsd just keep working, and are an easy patch/upgrade process. Servers I setup in Ubuntu break and have weird patching issues. Maybe it's something I'm doing, but I sure do like that OpenBSD seems a lot easier to just have solid and work indefinitely.

Well - I would recommend using a better linux distribution than Ubuntu.

I run just lighttpd these days; used to run httpd before they decided the configuration must become even more complicated. I don't have any issues with lighttpd (admittedly only few people use it; most seem to now use nginx).

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#8

I appreciate that OpenBSD sold its course on security-everywhere. Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants. There are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing, or years before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux outperformed their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick" strategy. But one of the key issues I had was this: I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I we…

What Linux has is mostly better hardware support and on gnome and some distributions they have a software installation tool that look like an app store but that's about it... Everything else is pretty much the same, random people wouldn't figure out a system is freebsd instead of Linux when running same desktop (like plasma).

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#10
One of the reasons why I'm using OpenBSD is because it passes what I think of as a litmus test for FLOSS software: can I build the whole thing from scratch, in a short time and with minimal fuss? In the case of OpenBSD, the answer is yes. I can install it on a new machine, fetch the source code from mirrors, do some edits to the source, build a fresh release, write it to a USB stick and boot it on another machine. On my machine, the whole process takes about 10 minutes for the kernel, additional 20 minutes for base and maybe an hour if you add Xenocara. Compare that to Linux distros like Ubuntu or Arch where building from scratch is either discouraged or some fringe activity that requires skimming through wiki articles, forum posts or old Websites on the Wayback Machine.
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