OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#151

Post by fluffything » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

There are trade-offs involved in choosing OpenBSD for a "Work"station, and the post covers some: lack of packages/no proper package manager (requires recompiling with patches from source), no Docker/VMs/VirtualBox/Wine, etc. Other are lack of drivers, etc. None of these issues are incompatible with an Operating System design (or not really), they mostly just need extra work.

However, the blog post mentions that "for them" performance isn't an issue. This should not be interpreted as performance being good. OpenBSD performance can only be described with data: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=8-linux-...

Even for something that the OpenBSD devs themselves are doing all the time, compiling stuff, OpenBSD is ~20x slower than Linux. 2x slower would be horrible. I really have no words to describe 20x slower performance. If you are a dev working with a compiled language, imagine a 20x perf hit on compile-times. Imagine having to patch LLVM/Clang on OpenBSD by recompiling it from source. "Apocalyptically horrible", "worst in class", do not even make justice for how slow OpenBSD is.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#152

Post by akulbe » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

moksly wrote: post #150

akulbe wrote: post #146

I have Linux-on-the-Windows-Desktop. WSL, that is. For my use case, it's fucking amazing. I've come full circle. I switched from Windows to Linux in 1999. I switched from Linux to Mac in 2003. I've used Linux natively, it turned into a hack-fest. I spent more time trying to get things working, than getting ACTUAL work done. Using the Linux platform for development is fantastic. It's when you want to do non-dev relate…

I’ve made the same transitions from win to Linux to Mac and for the same reasons. I’m going back to Linux though. I’ve used windows professionally all that time and Windows 10 is the least productive it’s ever been, for me anyway. It’s just such a horrible experience and I don’t know exactly why that is. I didn’t even mind CMD and powershell and it’s not that I dislike Microsoft. I recently traded my personal g-suite…

To discount the sweeping changes in the company culture because they haven't yet worked on what you want them to, don't you think that's a little short-sighted?

I wanted Microsoft to release a new terminal. It took 2 years. Now that it's out, I want it to support panes. There's only so much they can do at once.

I wanted a good consistent UI experience for Linux. It's been decades and that still hasn't happened. The groups maintaining KDE and Gnome can hardly agree among themselves much less with the userbase.

At this point, I'm more inclined to believe that Microsoft will get things done faster, than the Linux community will.

I'm not slamming Linux, either. Just being realistic after many years/attempts of being user. Better to have a stable and consistent base to work from. If you ask me, that's why so many folks who target Linux for development do it from a non-Linux platform. It makes for a much less frustrating experience.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#153

Post by z3phyr » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 7:35 AM UTC

h1d wrote: post #142

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #131

For years I lived in FreeBSD world - servers and laptops. I was fighting the good fight and rationalised that having to only remember one location for network services was a win. Then I took a second look. I realised that I was spending waaayy too much time getting the laptop usable (usually wifi) and not going enough using it I bailed for ubuntu and I cannot remember where the network confit is and hate the GUI but…

What's so dirty bypassing that isn't productive for you?

What does productive mean? The thing that get you satisfaction or money?

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#154

Post by flukus » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 7:42 AM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #11

OpenBSD will download your wifi firmware during first boot (post-install) if there is a configured internet connection (i.e. ethernet).

Is there an easy to use alternative? Less and less laptops are coming with ethernet ports.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#155

Post by Stratoscope » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 7:49 AM UTC

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #132

Stratoscope wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThinkPad is under rather different leadership from Lenovo's consumer division that had the Superfish debacle on IdeaPads and the like. Sure, they are part of one corporation at the very top, but you don't have to go very far down the org chart before they split into separate teams and leadership. ThinkPad is from the old IBM teams in Raleigh and Yamato. Lenovo made their own laptops before buying IBM's personal compu…

I shouldn't have to learn about the internal structure of a company in order to buy a laptop without malware. Maybe Lenovo should have thought about their internal structure and their brand reputation before installing malware on their laptops, or maybe not (because they don't care about clients like me, they care about the 90% of bosses that buy bulks of Thinkpads and don't know what firmware is). But anyway, it was…

Of course it's up to you to decide what computer to buy or not to buy, based on whatever criteria you see fit.

But I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by ruling out ThinkPads just because of a boneheaded decision that Lenovo's consumer division made a few years ago. ThinkPad and IdeaPad really are two separate organizations under one corporate umbrella.

Superfish was not something handed down from on high, it was the bright idea of the consumer group. The ThinkPad team would never go along with something like that; it's not in their DNA and it would destroy their business. Their bread and butter isn't you and me, it's large organizations with IT and security departments who deploy hundreds of ThinkPads at a time and look very closely at the software on them.

Only offering food for thought, it's cool with me whether you buy ThinkPads or something else. :-)

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#156

Post by ianai » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:04 AM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #152

moksly wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve made the same transitions from win to Linux to Mac and for the same reasons. I’m going back to Linux though. I’ve used windows professionally all that time and Windows 10 is the least productive it’s ever been, for me anyway. It’s just such a horrible experience and I don’t know exactly why that is. I didn’t even mind CMD and powershell and it’s not that I dislike Microsoft. I recently traded my personal g-suite…

To discount the sweeping changes in the company culture because they haven't yet worked on what you want them to, don't you think that's a little short-sighted? I wanted Microsoft to release a new terminal. It took 2 years. Now that it's out, I want it to support panes. There's only so much they can do at once. I wanted a good consistent UI experience for Linux. It's been decades and that still hasn't happened. The g…

I’ve just concluded that a decent GUI/UX requires more resources than any OSS project ever will. Or even any project outside of Apple/MS.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#157

Post by dpwm » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:08 AM UTC

fluffything wrote: post #151

There are trade-offs involved in choosing OpenBSD for a "Work"station, and the post covers some: lack of packages/no proper package manager (requires recompiling with patches from source), no Docker/VMs/VirtualBox/Wine, etc. Other are lack of drivers, etc. None of these issues are incompatible with an Operating System design (or not really), they mostly just need extra work. However, the blog post mentions that "for…

I'm not sure how much we can extrapolate from those benchmarks.

Despite the name, compilebench[0][1] seems to do a lot of non-compiling stuff. It appears to be more of a filesystem benchmark.

[0] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/compilebench

[1] https://oss.oracle.com/~mason/compilebench/

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#158

Post by moksly » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:24 AM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #152

moksly wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve made the same transitions from win to Linux to Mac and for the same reasons. I’m going back to Linux though. I’ve used windows professionally all that time and Windows 10 is the least productive it’s ever been, for me anyway. It’s just such a horrible experience and I don’t know exactly why that is. I didn’t even mind CMD and powershell and it’s not that I dislike Microsoft. I recently traded my personal g-suite…

To discount the sweeping changes in the company culture because they haven't yet worked on what you want them to, don't you think that's a little short-sighted? I wanted Microsoft to release a new terminal. It took 2 years. Now that it's out, I want it to support panes. There's only so much they can do at once. I wanted a good consistent UI experience for Linux. It's been decades and that still hasn't happened. The g…

We’ve worked with Microsoft for decades and I personally really like them as an enterprise partner, but I’m just not seeing those sweeping cultural changes you are.

They’ve certainly opened up, they’ve even open sourced .Net with core. It works with Linux, but it works better if you feed it security through Active Directoy, monitor it with Application insights and deploy it in Azure. There is now a CLI, VSC and Visual Studio for Mac, but Visual Studio for Windows is still light years better. And that’s really the general story. They’ve opened up, but I see it much more as Microsoft understanding the market again than a “new” Microsoft. I’m fine with it, it’s certainly nice to have better products, but I do think it’s the same old story of getting the most out of your environment if you buy all of it from Microsoft. I’m perfectly fine with that by the way, they are a company after all, and if they can make better products than they did before then cool!

I don’t personally think Windows 10 is a better product though. I find it to be one of the most frustrating OSes I’ve ever had to use, aWd that’s why I’m not going windows -> Linux -> Mac -> Windows like you are. I think Ubuntu is a much better experience than Windows 10, but then, I happen to actually really like gnome.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#159

Post by patrick5415 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:25 AM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #155

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't have to learn about the internal structure of a company in order to buy a laptop without malware. Maybe Lenovo should have thought about their internal structure and their brand reputation before installing malware on their laptops, or maybe not (because they don't care about clients like me, they care about the 90% of bosses that buy bulks of Thinkpads and don't know what firmware is). But anyway, it was…

Of course it's up to you to decide what computer to buy or not to buy, based on whatever criteria you see fit. But I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by ruling out ThinkPads just because of a boneheaded decision that Lenovo's consumer division made a few years ago. ThinkPad and IdeaPad really are two separate organizations under one corporate umbrella. Superfish was not something handed down from on high, it…

Personally, I agree with the op. If we want to send a message that malware in our BIOSs is absolutely unacceptable, it makes zero sense to give Lenovo any business.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#160

Post by gbrown_ » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:28 AM UTC

stabbles wrote: post #140

Does anyone know the status of Bluetooth on OpenBSD? I believe it does not ship Bluez by default?

It was removed [1] and there aren't plans to bring it back as far as I'm aware. Though you may be surprised in that you can get away without Bluetooth support for some things, e.g. [2].

[1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=140511572108715&w=2

[2] https://xosc.org/bluetooth.html