I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian. Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just perfect).
Why use OpenBSD?
31–40 of 106 posts
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#32If you can tolerate poor performance then by all means use OpenBSD.
Debian stable FTW.
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#33Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#34To 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.
I feel like DragonflyBSD is really cool if you want to look at some BSD that offers some advantages and something unique to your day-to-day desktop usage. And I feel like their community is not as toxic as that of FreeBSD and OpenBSD with their holier-than-thou attitude towards Linux.
I'd love it if Gentoo/BSD were a thing once again, I like the BSD concepts but there's nothing like Portage on BSD so far - afaik pkgsrc is nowhere close to it.
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#35I tried using OpenBSD, but the support for some specific things isn't very good. For example, J language support is always missing some packages. I also don't want to, and very much do not want to, use systemd. I finally chose FreeBSD, but I'm using some things from OpenBSD as much as possible, like obhttpd, etc. It feels good now.
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#36I hope people here keep donating to the OpenBSD project. I have myself not yet but I'm waiting yo do that
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#37If you can tolerate poor performance then by all means use OpenBSD. Debian stable FTW.
You do have to buy more powerful hardware than you otherwise would. I find it worth it to run code I can more easily understand. I agree on Debian as well. My router and laptop are OpenBSD but most vms on my proxmox are Debian.
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#38Servers 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.
How to upgrade Debian unattended if it's not a rolling release
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#39To 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.
When I switched to FreeBSD, it was because of the quality of the documentation. In Linux manpages are a patchwork from various sources, and it shows; it's not rare for a manpage to be missing, obsolete, or to document another similar tool, or to be inacurrate... Much better than in many other OSes, but still nowhere as good as in FreeBSD.
Now that I think of it, when I switched from DOS to Linux it was already because I found manpages amazing. Maybe I've just a soft spot for documentation.
Re: Why use OpenBSD?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The license makes it very different philosophically.
Which is what makes Linux kernel stand out, as we can see by Sony and Apple contributions upstream. Had BSD not been busy with AT&T lawsuit, all major UNIXes would probably still be around, consuming whatever was produced out of BSD like the networking code and OS IPC improvements over AT&T UNIX. Instead sponsoring Linux kernel became the plan B, as means to reduce their UNIX development costs. > Commercial use began…
Of course big corporations would rather not be obliged by the GPL. But my feeling is that, if we give them the option to grab the code without contributing back their improvements, they would just do that. In the long run, this risks harming the OSS community, as developers would feel like big corps are being leeches and profiting out of their work without giving anything back.
After all, the GPL forces to contribute back only if you modify and distribute a modified version of the software (the AGPL modified this point, to account for cloud services). A corporation that isn't modifying GPL'd code or isn't redistributing the modified binaries, doesn't incur any additional burden for using a software distributed under the GPL.