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OpenBSD 7.0

openbsd.org

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Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#71
post #61
post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

I used open BSD for a little while. It's very simple, clean, and elegantly designed. If you're looking to learn more about Unix, then you'll have a lot of fun with OpenBSD. If you want to use it as a daily driver, you're probably going to run into some headaches. That being said, if you're willing to put in some time, learn a little bit and forgo some software here and there, you certainly *could* use OpenBSD as a da…

> If you want to use it as a daily driver, you're probably going to run into some headaches

This all depends on the hardware you bring to the table. A random Acer laptop with a questionable ACPI table is probably going to have problems, but a previous-gen Thinkpad X1 should be great because that's what the devs use.

> you're not going to find a lot of the software you might normally use

This really depends on your use cases – I can do most of the development I want on my OpenBSD laptop. But there are some gaps, absolutely.

> The performance is not great and battery life is not very good.

Harder to argue this one. It's getting better release by release, though :)

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#72
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coherency, security, stability, ZFS... Perfect on a server (e.g. a VPS), may not be as good as a desktop or as something to run on a laptop (depending on hardware).

> Coherency, security, stability, ZFS... My only sort of complaint in regards to FreeBSD is actually ZFS. Not that it's not fantastic, or that it shouldn't be there. ZFS does however clearly comes from Solaris, and there have been no effort to make the ZFS command line tools feel more BSD like. Changing the tooling around ZFS probably isn't a great idea, but coherency has clearly taken a backseat to features in this…

> Changing the tooling around ZFS probably isn't a great idea, but coherency has clearly taken a backseat to features in this case.

Right, because ZFS is a foreign piece of software that runs on other operating systems. At that point you are better off keeping those tools coherent with other ZFS implementations. This is a good compromise.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#73
post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

I recently built my latest server in FreeBSD just to get some hard experience with it...

...and I love it! Documentation is generally excellent, readable, and centralized. There are only a dozen or two processes running on a fresh system without much of anything installed, and idle CPU usage is the zeroyist zero I've ever seen for a server OS. The directory structure in `man hier` is actually used, and it feels like the surface area of what I have to learn to be proficient is sooooooooooo much smaller. It's not perfect (home and end keys don't work consistently) but definitely a breath of fresh air.

Plus, many programs (ezjail, for example) integrate tightly with ZFS, which is also awesome. I know linux finally got quality ZFS support but BSD (along with solaris) are OG

Plus, now I am learning a great deal about how MacOS is built.

Funny enough, I have a DJ controller (Pioneer XDJ-XZ) that uses BSD for its operating system. So it seems to be a great embedded audio OS as well!

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#74
post #37
post #6

Any BSD fans out there wish to persuade a happy Debian desktop user to take a BSD for a spin?

Linux systems are made by dozens of disparate teams, and it shows. Every command has a different syntax - just think about how "help" could be -h, --help, -help, -? etc BSDs are very tightly integrated. The entire OS is very consistent and 'correct', down to the tiny and pedantic details like putting things under /usr that are usually installed in /bin, because that's the way it's supposed to be . (Ex. `/usr/local/bi…

Why is that "the way it's supposed to be," and how is it going to improve my user experience? It just seems like unnecessary complexity to me.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#75
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They should take a page out of Microsoft's book here Yeah NO. OpenBSD is the opposite of backward compatibility by design. You should have known that before installing at your customers site en masse. That's probably one point why PFsense is based on freebsd and OPNsense on hardenedbsd.

^^ The wording of this response represents exactly why many people don't choose OpenBSD.

Indeed.

Last time I gave a look at OpenBSD I immediately noticed a huge courtain of gatekeeping around pretty much anything.

Meh.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#79
post #39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux systems are made by dozens of disparate teams, and it shows. Every command has a different syntax - just think about how "help" could be -h, --help, -help, -? etc BSDs are very tightly integrated. The entire OS is very consistent and 'correct', down to the tiny and pedantic details like putting things under /usr that are usually installed in /bin, because that's the way it's supposed to be . (Ex. `/usr/local/bi…

Just to clarify, Bash is installed under /usr/local because it’s from packages and not part of the base system. The base shell, ksh, is at /bin/ksh. You probably know that but I just felt like being pedantic this morning :).

Yes, absolutely true. The idea is that `ksh` is good enough, and the extra features of bash are extraneous or unnecessary, making it an add-on rather than a core feature.

It's an interesting idea, and while I feel bash is absolutely 'good enough' to be part of the base system, I wouldn't want zsh or fish part of my base system - so it's then a matter of opinion whose shell is bloat and whose is essential. So I respect their decision to not include bash in the base image - it's meant to be uncompromisingly lean and simple.

Re: OpenBSD 7.0

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that would make me switch from Linux why exactly? Don't get me wrong, I was a BSD user for many years (FreeBSD 3.5-5.0) but I don't think that's enough reason to switch.

It made me switch from Linux. If it doesn't sound compelling to you, that's okay too, Linux is great. But I do think focusing on the consistency of design really is the best high-level summary of the difference between Linux and OpenBSD.

Consistency is great, but there's no equivalent to NixOS for the BSDs -- that I know of.

Am I actually wrong about that? Is there some declarative configuration system I should be using, which I've simply never heard of?

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