Live data from Hacker News

Why use OpenBSD?

tumfatig.net

11–20 of 106 posts

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#11

[flagged]

AI? I may be missing something. You are talking about whom here? The blog author?

GP is referring to the LLM crawler captcha thing. The one with the anime girls in it. It only took a few seconds on my phone, but it's slow on my old ThinkPad.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#12
To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself other than just for the sake of using something different and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but nowadays Linux has caught up in features.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#14

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…

The NetBSD thing is becoming true again as Linux distros and the kernel are lately on a tear of purging old and niche architectures.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#15
post #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…

Gentoo is a Linux rolling release built from source (just recently they gave the option of using binary packages as well). I've ran it on my desktop for years.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#16

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).

And which distribution would that be?

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#17

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).

The license makes it very different philosophically.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#19

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…

It was a fluke or a problem with the computer unless you can provide more than 1 data point with more info than "it wasn't running".

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#20

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.

You are not....it's Ubuntu.

Not Linux, not Debian, Ubuntu.

Debian (provided you don't just dump a bunch of 3rd party repos) just upgrades cleanly, we have hundreds of servers that just run unattended-upgrade and get upgraded to new Debian version every 2 years.

The few Ubuntus we had had more problems.

Post reply on HN