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OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

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Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#191

Post by fulafel »

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…

You can use the server cli/conffile driven networking tools, ifupdown (pre-18) / netplan (18.04+) even if you are on a laptop and running GUI. Just uninstall NetworkManager.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#192

Post by munmaek »

gbmor wrote: post #163
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…

I switched from Linux to OpenBSD, then to FreeBSD as my primary OS on my laptop, which involved a bit more set-up time than I was accustomed to with Linux, previously. Eventually I grew tired of the manual setup for so many things and bailed for Debian Sid. It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I still get to tinker and scratch that itch.

I went the same route. Arch -> Void -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian Stretch (no desktop, just xorg + i3).

I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc.

I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with random bugs :-)

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#193

Post by fluffything »

vbezhenar wrote: post #167
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…

> requires recompiling with patches from source I don't think that's true. There's pkg_add and syspatch and those are preferred methods for upgrading your system. You can recompile things from source and I think that it's an awesome feature for hacker, who wants to tinker with sources of some package, but that's not the only way.

Between distro releases, if you want to apply security patches, you need to recompile from source, because there are no binary releases.

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#194

Post by lifeisstillgood »

brokenkebab wrote: post #166
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…

And what really stopped you from having your laptop finally configured?

Frankly there was just too much to learn - I remember being totally chuffed I had found a slimline xdm replacement with no dependency on Gnome / KDE and yeah it is good and it is lightweight and I knew where the source code was but ... even if I found a slim lightweight version of every thing on a modern desktop - well I could not even list all the components.

There is a some unix replacement project trying to rewrite major parts "simply". But in the end you just don't understand 90% of what is going on or you have a tiny tiny server.

It's like everything these days is npm - install one thing and suddenly you find there are 900 packages installed including left-pad-0.3.4

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#195

Post by rthomas6 »

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…

Arch Linux is calling you

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#196

Post by adrianratnapala »

microcolonel wrote: post #70
dTal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use OpenBSD for various functionality-related reasons, but experiencing that was an eye-opener. It makes me mad that Linux doesn't use such a clearly superior system, and leads one to wonder what other needlessly complex interfaces we put up with unquestioningly.

There are things other than wpa_supplicant, but wpa_supplicant is just sorta "good enough", everything generally works. It's a different approach. For me, my OpenBSD moment was when I used the backlight brightness keys on a laptop in a vt, and it Just Worked™.

I would put it the other way around. wpa_supplicant is actually very good at doing what it does. But rolling it's functionality into ifconfig is probably "good enough".

wpa_supplicant is an application of the "do one thing" philosophy. The kernel provides a some basic hardware-abstracted plumbing which lets a specialist tool do all the complicated handshaking and what-not for wireless.

This saves the basic tools (ifconfig, ip) from having to build in all that wireless complexity. But it does introduce an extra moving part that has to be configured. For this reason, just bloating it into the basic tool is likely to be good enough, and also provider a superior UX (for nerds like us).

Re: OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

#197

Post by gbmor »

munmaek wrote: post #192
gbmor wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Linux to OpenBSD, then to FreeBSD as my primary OS on my laptop, which involved a bit more set-up time than I was accustomed to with Linux, previously. Eventually I grew tired of the manual setup for so many things and bailed for Debian Sid. It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I still get to tinker and scratch that itch.

I went the same route. Arch -> Void -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian Stretch (no desktop, just xorg + i3). I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc. I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with random bugs :…

That is exactly how I feel.
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