Replying from the latest -current snapshot on my desktop (AMD Ryzen 7 / B450 chipset / ECC RAM) and have nothing but good things to say about OpenBSD. As others have iterated, this operating system is extremely reliable, secure by default, very well documented, and I have not found performance to be an issue whatsoever. Definitely recommend everyone, especially Linux users, to check it out!
OpenBSD 6.5
181–190 of 208 posts
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It just means that startx no longer requires root to start X. It removes setuid root from one more executable.
Even better. Then it’s a win-win.
I was incorrect: It appears that you do in fact need root to run startx now:
(quoting the faq page for upgrade65):
Xorg(1). The Xorg binary is no longer installed setuid, so startx(1) can no longer be used by non-root users. The xenodm(1) display manager has to be used instead.
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, a good lawsuit at the wrong time will do that to you. For those who don't know what I am talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.... . For what this has to do with Linux adoption, read http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/a... about how the uncertainty around all of the BSD distributions lead to people jumping onto the Linux bandwagon. This got Linux…
The lawsuit myth needs to die! Remember when SCO was trying to sue everybody over Linux? Why didn't the *BSDs become more popular then? Linux being more popular then the BSDs had nothing to do with anything Legal outside of Linux being GPL.
On what basis are you saying that it is a myth?
During the BSD lawsuit, free software was not widely understood, the company doing the suing (AT&T) was one of the biggest in the world, and the one being sued (BSDI) was a nobody by comparison. It was clear that AT&T had grounds for a real case. Everyone I know that was there says that there was real fear of the outcome. And I've known a lot who were there.
By contrast when the SCO lawsuit happened, open source was far better understood, it was a small company (SCO) doing the suing, and the companies being sued were the biggest in the world (starting with IBM). This threat was far less credible, and if it failed, everyone assumed that they would get lost in the shuffle.
It didn't hurt for the latter case that groklaw stepped up and there were endless well-informed people who said that the case was groundless. And no, I don't just mean nerds who read slashdot. But also most of the tech media, various interested lawyers, and so on.
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty great. As someone said below: I'd buy a tshirt.
There's a funny story by Linda Branagan, of an earlier BSD T-shirt: https://www.astro.umd.edu/~avondale/extra/Humor/ComputerHumo...
This confirms a whole host of my baseless presuppositions about things. Mostly Texas.
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mounted the disk and tried to read off the log, but couldn't. I mean yes, you need something to parse the logs and turn them into human readable text, but the logs are perfectly readable. journalctl --file /mnt/var/log/journal/` A lot, dare I say most, of the parts of systemd actually are optional or do nothing until you use them like systemd-machined.
> journalctl --file /mnt/var/log/journal/` Lol you actually think that's good.
Yikes, please don't be mean like that on HN. Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? They include:
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#186Can anyone share if Surface Go support has improved with this release?
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a funny story by Linda Branagan, of an earlier BSD T-shirt: https://www.astro.umd.edu/~avondale/extra/Humor/ComputerHumo...
This confirms a whole host of my baseless presuppositions about things. Mostly Texas.
The story is written so well, I'm not sure it's not a bit embellished. :)
Anyway, there's all kinds of people, everywhere, and I don't think those two characters are representative of Texas as a whole. Texas has a lot of diversity, a lot of good work comes out of there, and people are generally decent and not like the extremes that sometimes percolate to the TV news.
Also, to the extent that Texans overall might tend to have qualities like, e.g., valuing principles and individual responsibility, I think that's good input to have, in a diverse marketplace of ideas (even though it might not be quite my own current thinking).
(Please pardon the straight response, on a humor tangent, but I felt a little bad when I realized I'd invoked a stereotype, and I felt I should clarify.)
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn't admitted? As far as I know, it is an explicitly stated goal of the systemd project to provide an integrated (compared to whatever each distribution assembled together to provide one) base system on top of the Linux kernel with the intent of making the best use of the features provided by the kernel. It seems to me that Lennart looked at the tightly integrated base system + kernel approach of the BSDs and decid…
Except it's not tightly integrated on OpenBSD, and that you can replace any component for any reason without the whole thing collapsing.
Fwiw, apart from journald and logind that’s true for systemd as well. You can choose to run nothing other than pid 1 and these two daemons. Everything else is optional.
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#189Sorry for noob question, but why would one use OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD? I like latter, but also hear good things about former, although there are some limitations (e.g. no ZFS). Thank you in advance.
Strengths of OpenBSD: * security -- the code is audited and hardened to a greater degree than any other general purpose OS on the planet (embedded safety critical microkernel systems would be the exception) * routing suite -- one of the most well integrated open source routing suites out there (alternatives include BIRD and free range routing / quagga) * firewall -- their firewall is flexible, fully featured, and eas…
Not sure what device, it depends what it would allow me to do. Thank you.
Re: OpenBSD 6.5
#190Still no unified buffer cache. :-( The lack of coherence and memory reuse between mmap(2) and read(2) is my single biggest beef with OpenBSD right now. It's a great system in terms of robustness, documentation, and philosophical unification. It's a shame its kernel still thinks Ronald Reagan is president.
What coherence is lacking? OpenBSD supports msync(2), which is the only POSIX mechanism I know of for ensuring coherency between read(2) and shared file mappings. Otherwise relying on unspecified behavior sounds dangerous.
Oh, come on. Every other system in common use is fully coherent. POSIX allowing OpenBSD's behavior doesn't make that behavior a good idea or a quality implementation.