11 ms·

Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular

by mruts 8y ago

Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. Damn you Linus...

agumonkey 8y ago
No need for harsh feelings. BSD value will have its time. Now don't read about perl vs php :p
pulsarpietro 8y ago
I have been a Linux user for more than a decade - recently switched to OpenBSD and I must say I agree. Linux has become a chaotic place to be, I agree.
- oneanddone 8y ago
  Quite. Especially now with their hideous CoC. That thing is straight out of the pits of PC hell. Many people think Linus will never again assume command now that he's stepped down for his so-called infractions. Gone now is the merit-based stuff and now it's all based on PC garbage. I miss the old days of IT, especially now.
- tinuninu 8y ago
  This means nothing to me. Can you be more specific why /Linux has become a chaotic place to be/.
  - oneanddone 8y ago
    Not OP, but I will offer my thoughts. Linux is terribly balkanized what with all the competing distros. There are no standards. This is one reason why Linux has not taken off on the desktop outside of tech circles. systemd. It violates almost every *nix tenet out there, especially "a program should do one thing well". It's has a few benefits, but the negatives outweigh these, namely more and more programs outside of the base system now require systemd. This should never be. I and millions of others agree that an init system should be able to be tweaked as text files. Not happening now. The logs are stored as binaries when they should be plain text. Debugging is more difficult. A program should do one thing well. Full stop. There is always BSD and Slackware, and I don't think Slackware will adopt systemd, as their user base doesn't want it. Slackware is the oldest currently-developed Linux distro out there and the vast majority of users want it to remain true to its roots while still advancing.
    - a7776f88862 8y ago
      There is also GNU Shepherd[1] on GuixSD[2], a declarative init system, without systemd's million-plus lines of shitty code[3] and massive scope creep into everything that you can (but probably don't need or want to) do on a computer. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html [3] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discussion/998562-systemd-breached-one-million-lines-of-code-in-2017 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...
heywire 8y ago
Is OpenBSD suitable for use on a laptop? I have a Dell Latitute 7370 running KDE Neon, and it runs really well. All hardware is supported, battery life is on-par with Windows, etc. Would OpenBSD work well on this laptop?
- johnnycarcin 8y ago
  I'd like to hear about this as well. OpenBSD has been on my list of "to try" for quite awhile but the app/package thing has been a big question mark for me. I _really_ enjoy being able to apt-get or brew install pretty much any of the applications out there and am a bit worried about how that experience would be on OpenBSD. I guess the best way to find out would be to try it eh? :)
  - magnetic 8y ago
    There is the core install and then packages that you can add just as easily as apt-get.
    - ahje 8y ago
      Does that apply to updates as well?
      - sverige 8y ago
        Yes. syspatch and pkg_add -u handle updates.
- toyg 8y ago
  Driver support will always trail behind Linux, so it depends. Personally, I’d be more interested into having openbsd as the standard for cloud deployments, a place currently inhabited by Ubuntu derivatives. If one could get the declarative goodness of Nix, the popularity of docker, and the reliability / security of openbsd, the world would be a better place.
  - 8y ago
_wmd 8y ago
"Quality" is a very subjective idea. Yes, docs are easy to keep consistent over long stretches of time if the speed of evolution is slow and a small number of like-minded assiduous gatekeepers can vet every change from a small number of contributors, but since the speed of evolution is slow, OpenBSD for example still has a giant lock protecting most of the kernel -- this despite nearly 2 decades of multicore chips shipping pretty much everywhere. Any growing project will always suffer from consistency problems -- humans just aren't capable of scaling to the point where a single hierarchy can consistently manage a monstrously large system. Linux doesn't have a 'base system' quite like OpenBSD: coreutils, libc, bash, and 20 other similar packages all come from a large variety of differently minded maintainers across the world. Viewed from a macro scale, OpenBSD's consistency breaks down immediately upon starting to install stuff from the ports collection - sure the base system makes a great firewall and basic HTTP server, but to use anything popular you pretty much immediately end up with ports. And the quality standards there are identical to Linux land, because it's the same code.
- aquabeagle 8y ago
  From the release notes: sendmsg(2), sendto(2), recvfrom(2) and recvmsg(2) are run without KERNEL_LOCK. The lock is being removed, slowly with care, piece by piece.
  - mrpippy 8y ago
    Also, I think FreeBSD eliminated the giant lock ~10 years ago and maintains similarly good documentation. It’s just a matter of priorities, and SMP scalability/high performance has never been on the top of the OpenBSD list.
    - IcePic 8y ago
      I thinks its a greyscale and have always been. Silly things like floppy (that noone uses) on fbsd used to attach with [GIANT LOCKED] for the longest time (if not still) but it doesn't matter. You would not call fbsd still under GL just because 1.44MB floppy drivers don't get any attention. So its not a binary on-or-off on any OS, its a process of unlocking one part at a time, out of hundreds, thousands of small subsystems and drivers without causing races. OpenBSD is most certainly behind, but there is no nice line over which you can say "Ah, now its not GL anymore", since there will be some part somewhere for some arch where you don't care that still retains the lock, and there were parts from day #1 that was completely unlocked on obsd like the syscall getpid() in all its triviality and race-free-ness.
jchw 8y ago
I mean, there's no denying that the Linux ecosystem is a mess from a cohesion perspective, but I think it's a bit unfair to come to this conclusion without taking more into account. As far as server operating systems go, nothing is more battletested than Linux today, and nothing really has a more complete offering. OpenBSD is great, of course, but my favorite thing about open source is the cross collaboration. Rather than dump literal decades of constant refinement to Linux and it's ecosystem because OpenBSD is much more elegant seems unwise. There are things Linux and the general Linux stacks could learn from OpenBSD (and should.) I don't think the world would be better if OpenBSD were in the position Linux is in today (though I have a hunch the security story around FOSS stacks would be better.) I think there is a lot of good that Linux can do with its more fast-and-loose organizational structure.
- auslander 8y ago
  > ... though I have a hunch the security story .. Which makes half of the news today. So, yes, world would be a bit better today if only ..
  - jchw 8y ago
    Don't think that security comes at no cost, though. OpenBSD goes a heroic distance to get it's reputation.
II2II 8y ago
If you are talking about Linux in terms of distributions, some of that mess carries over to OpenBSD as soon as you start installing packages since a lot software depends upon that messy infrastructure. Of course, a base OpenBSD installation is wonderful to work with and the damage can be minimized through the careful selection of packages.
DCKing 8y ago
One thing Linux has going for it is a bunch of popular features for developers' desktops: * Electron apps - VSCode, Atom, Slack, almost every universal desktop app that gets released today. Individual ports of apps to FreeBSD exist, but there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs. * Good desktop virtualization - KVM, VirtualBox (okay FreeBSD has these in theory), VMware * First-class Docker and desktop container support (FreeBSD jails exist but there is no container ecosystem like there is on Linux) You can still run Firefox, mail clients, vim/emacs, Unix utilities and LibreOffice on any of the BSDs just fine. They're lacking other niceties however. And that's a bad thing in my opinion - although it's mostly not the fault of any of these projects. Some people think BSD is better for lacking those options, but I can't live without them for one. It's unfortunate: Linux and the BSDs used to have more or less the same application support. Anything Unix-y ran on anything Unix-y. There was nothing stopping you from having an OpenBSD desktop almost identical in function as, say, a Xubuntu desktop - one that looked much cleaner on the inside. But once broader commercial interest started happening for Linux, the BSDs were mostly left by the wayside in application support.
- a012 8y ago
  Docker trends do favour to Linux, while the virtualization in FreeBSD IMO is still a hard wall for many people. Jails, ezjail, bhyve, chyve, etc. Requires amount of works to get it just right. While docker runs a container is straight forward. I don't mean which is better but definitely *BSD is less attractive than mainstream Linux.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    vmm in OpenBSD is pretty easy: vmctl create disk1.img -s 10G vmctl start vm1 -d disk1.img -b /bsd.rd -L -c
- simias 8y ago
  Post hoc ergo propter hoc. All the software you mention is relatively recent (with the exception of VMware arguably) and Linux was ahead of the BSDs in adoption long before these applications were created. Now what exactly created this divide to begin with is a matter of debate but it took place mostly in the 90's and the very early 00's. By the mid 2000's it was clear that BSDs would have a really hard time ever catching up with Linux, especially for non-server applications. Paradoxically it might be partially why BSDs are so clean and tidy: fewer features, fewer contributors and of course they're making a complete operating system instead of just a kernel or just a distribution. FreeBSD remains my favourite OS for servers, it's rock solid and a joy to administrate. Unfortunately for the desktop I've given up almost a decade ago, driver support is just too lackluster, especially (as you mention) for proprietary software that can't be easily ported.
jhasse 8y ago
IMHO Linux has the better license. Not sure if I'm in the minority with this opinion?
- auslander 8y ago
  GPL (distribute your code) is better than BSD permissive (do what you want)? For whom?
  - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
    For almost all of us. Companies extend the BSD OSs with proprietary additions, then abandon the work and it gets lost. With Linux, everyone is forced to play nice and release under the GPL, and the work gets to live as long as people value it. Hence the Linux kernel snowballing and taking over the world, whereas the BSDs have not, despite being at least as strong technically. The better Linux gets, the more people target it, and the virtuous cycle continues. Additionally, as it grows bigger and bigger, the more of the proprietary competition it crushes underfoot (sorry Solaris), and the more traction FOSS gets.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Hence why companies are now trying to move away from Linux on embedded, e.g. ARM mbed, RTOS, Zephyr, Fuchsia, ....
      - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
        Sure, Linux doesn't have a total monopoly in every domain. Sony used FreeBSD as the basis of the OSs of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4, for instance, and the work they did will never be contributed back. I don't see any proprietary Unix seriously competing with Linux any time soon though.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        The OSes that I have listed have all BSD style licenses, nothing proprietary about them as such. As for competition with proprietary UNIX, probably not against Aix or HP-UX as they survive on maintenance contracts for big customers like banks and telecommunication companies, but Linux is still no match for high integrity computing OSes, many of which are micro-kernels with POSIX userspace available as possible API.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
> It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. I'm not sure that's fair. Linux has snowballed, whereas OpenBSD hasn't. Linux is a much larger system. Is it surprising you find OpenBSD to be tidier?
reacharavindh 8y ago
It's not fair to compare the two. I love OpenBSD for use cases where I care about correctness, stability, security even at the cost of performance or the having the latest feature set. Firewall, DNS, HTTPD and the like. However, when it comes to running scientific applications and squeezing out last bits of performance or servers where people expect stuff to "just work, and if doesn't do apt-get blah", it's Linux that takes the cake. FreeBSD and ZFS - the best I've worked with for Network Attached Storage. Can't believe it is just free.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Do you have a preferred recipe for FreeBSD/ZFS NAS? Is it FreeNAS?
  - reacharavindh 8y ago
    I don't use FreeNAS. I run FreeBSD and ZFS myself. ZFS file server: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ ZFS file server performance: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/
kurtisc 8y ago
I've never understood why the end users of these free and libre kernels feel the need to fight so much.
- caf 8y ago
  I'm not sure, but I bet it's the same reason why (some of) the end users of, say, Boeing and Airbus aircraft feel the need to fight so much as well.
h1d 8y ago
> Linux is a depressing mess Citation or you only heard it. Not even going to poke on your rest of statements.

by mruts 8y ago

agumonkey 8y ago

No need for harsh feelings. BSD value will have its time. Now don't read about perl vs php :p

pulsarpietro 8y ago

I have been a Linux user for more than a decade - recently switched to OpenBSD and I must say I agree. Linux has become a chaotic place to be, I agree.

oneanddone 8y ago
Quite. Especially now with their hideous CoC. That thing is straight out of the pits of PC hell. Many people think Linus will never again assume command now that he's stepped down for his so-called infractions. Gone now is the merit-based stuff and now it's all based on PC garbage. I miss the old days of IT, especially now.
tinuninu 8y ago
This means nothing to me. Can you be more specific why /Linux has become a chaotic place to be/.
- oneanddone 8y ago
  Not OP, but I will offer my thoughts. Linux is terribly balkanized what with all the competing distros. There are no standards. This is one reason why Linux has not taken off on the desktop outside of tech circles. systemd. It violates almost every *nix tenet out there, especially "a program should do one thing well". It's has a few benefits, but the negatives outweigh these, namely more and more programs outside of the base system now require systemd. This should never be. I and millions of others agree that an init system should be able to be tweaked as text files. Not happening now. The logs are stored as binaries when they should be plain text. Debugging is more difficult. A program should do one thing well. Full stop. There is always BSD and Slackware, and I don't think Slackware will adopt systemd, as their user base doesn't want it. Slackware is the oldest currently-developed Linux distro out there and the vast majority of users want it to remain true to its roots while still advancing.
  - a7776f88862 8y ago
    There is also GNU Shepherd[1] on GuixSD[2], a declarative init system, without systemd's million-plus lines of shitty code[3] and massive scope creep into everything that you can (but probably don't need or want to) do on a computer. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html [3] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discussion/998562-systemd-breached-one-million-lines-of-code-in-2017 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...

heywire 8y ago

Is OpenBSD suitable for use on a laptop? I have a Dell Latitute 7370 running KDE Neon, and it runs really well. All hardware is supported, battery life is on-par with Windows, etc. Would OpenBSD work well on this laptop?

johnnycarcin 8y ago
I'd like to hear about this as well. OpenBSD has been on my list of "to try" for quite awhile but the app/package thing has been a big question mark for me. I _really_ enjoy being able to apt-get or brew install pretty much any of the applications out there and am a bit worried about how that experience would be on OpenBSD. I guess the best way to find out would be to try it eh? :)
- magnetic 8y ago
  There is the core install and then packages that you can add just as easily as apt-get.
  - ahje 8y ago
    Does that apply to updates as well?
    - sverige 8y ago
      Yes. syspatch and pkg_add -u handle updates.
toyg 8y ago
Driver support will always trail behind Linux, so it depends. Personally, I’d be more interested into having openbsd as the standard for cloud deployments, a place currently inhabited by Ubuntu derivatives. If one could get the declarative goodness of Nix, the popularity of docker, and the reliability / security of openbsd, the world would be a better place.
- 8y ago

_wmd 8y ago

"Quality" is a very subjective idea. Yes, docs are easy to keep consistent over long stretches of time if the speed of evolution is slow and a small number of like-minded assiduous gatekeepers can vet every change from a small number of contributors, but since the speed of evolution is slow, OpenBSD for example still has a giant lock protecting most of the kernel -- this despite nearly 2 decades of multicore chips shipping pretty much everywhere. Any growing project will always suffer from consistency problems -- humans just aren't capable of scaling to the point where a single hierarchy can consistently manage a monstrously large system. Linux doesn't have a 'base system' quite like OpenBSD: coreutils, libc, bash, and 20 other similar packages all come from a large variety of differently minded maintainers across the world. Viewed from a macro scale, OpenBSD's consistency breaks down immediately upon starting to install stuff from the ports collection - sure the base system makes a great firewall and basic HTTP server, but to use anything popular you pretty much immediately end up with ports. And the quality standards there are identical to Linux land, because it's the same code.

aquabeagle 8y ago
From the release notes: sendmsg(2), sendto(2), recvfrom(2) and recvmsg(2) are run without KERNEL_LOCK. The lock is being removed, slowly with care, piece by piece.
- mrpippy 8y ago
  Also, I think FreeBSD eliminated the giant lock ~10 years ago and maintains similarly good documentation. It’s just a matter of priorities, and SMP scalability/high performance has never been on the top of the OpenBSD list.
  - IcePic 8y ago
    I thinks its a greyscale and have always been. Silly things like floppy (that noone uses) on fbsd used to attach with [GIANT LOCKED] for the longest time (if not still) but it doesn't matter. You would not call fbsd still under GL just because 1.44MB floppy drivers don't get any attention. So its not a binary on-or-off on any OS, its a process of unlocking one part at a time, out of hundreds, thousands of small subsystems and drivers without causing races. OpenBSD is most certainly behind, but there is no nice line over which you can say "Ah, now its not GL anymore", since there will be some part somewhere for some arch where you don't care that still retains the lock, and there were parts from day #1 that was completely unlocked on obsd like the syscall getpid() in all its triviality and race-free-ness.

jchw 8y ago

I mean, there's no denying that the Linux ecosystem is a mess from a cohesion perspective, but I think it's a bit unfair to come to this conclusion without taking more into account. As far as server operating systems go, nothing is more battletested than Linux today, and nothing really has a more complete offering. OpenBSD is great, of course, but my favorite thing about open source is the cross collaboration. Rather than dump literal decades of constant refinement to Linux and it's ecosystem because OpenBSD is much more elegant seems unwise. There are things Linux and the general Linux stacks could learn from OpenBSD (and should.) I don't think the world would be better if OpenBSD were in the position Linux is in today (though I have a hunch the security story around FOSS stacks would be better.) I think there is a lot of good that Linux can do with its more fast-and-loose organizational structure.

auslander 8y ago
> ... though I have a hunch the security story .. Which makes half of the news today. So, yes, world would be a bit better today if only ..
- jchw 8y ago
  Don't think that security comes at no cost, though. OpenBSD goes a heroic distance to get it's reputation.

II2II 8y ago

If you are talking about Linux in terms of distributions, some of that mess carries over to OpenBSD as soon as you start installing packages since a lot software depends upon that messy infrastructure. Of course, a base OpenBSD installation is wonderful to work with and the damage can be minimized through the careful selection of packages.

DCKing 8y ago

One thing Linux has going for it is a bunch of popular features for developers' desktops: * Electron apps - VSCode, Atom, Slack, almost every universal desktop app that gets released today. Individual ports of apps to FreeBSD exist, but there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs. * Good desktop virtualization - KVM, VirtualBox (okay FreeBSD has these in theory), VMware * First-class Docker and desktop container support (FreeBSD jails exist but there is no container ecosystem like there is on Linux) You can still run Firefox, mail clients, vim/emacs, Unix utilities and LibreOffice on any of the BSDs just fine. They're lacking other niceties however. And that's a bad thing in my opinion - although it's mostly not the fault of any of these projects. Some people think BSD is better for lacking those options, but I can't live without them for one. It's unfortunate: Linux and the BSDs used to have more or less the same application support. Anything Unix-y ran on anything Unix-y. There was nothing stopping you from having an OpenBSD desktop almost identical in function as, say, a Xubuntu desktop - one that looked much cleaner on the inside. But once broader commercial interest started happening for Linux, the BSDs were mostly left by the wayside in application support.

a012 8y ago
Docker trends do favour to Linux, while the virtualization in FreeBSD IMO is still a hard wall for many people. Jails, ezjail, bhyve, chyve, etc. Requires amount of works to get it just right. While docker runs a container is straight forward. I don't mean which is better but definitely *BSD is less attractive than mainstream Linux.
- ams6110 8y ago
  vmm in OpenBSD is pretty easy: vmctl create disk1.img -s 10G vmctl start vm1 -d disk1.img -b /bsd.rd -L -c
simias 8y ago
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. All the software you mention is relatively recent (with the exception of VMware arguably) and Linux was ahead of the BSDs in adoption long before these applications were created. Now what exactly created this divide to begin with is a matter of debate but it took place mostly in the 90's and the very early 00's. By the mid 2000's it was clear that BSDs would have a really hard time ever catching up with Linux, especially for non-server applications. Paradoxically it might be partially why BSDs are so clean and tidy: fewer features, fewer contributors and of course they're making a complete operating system instead of just a kernel or just a distribution. FreeBSD remains my favourite OS for servers, it's rock solid and a joy to administrate. Unfortunately for the desktop I've given up almost a decade ago, driver support is just too lackluster, especially (as you mention) for proprietary software that can't be easily ported.

jhasse 8y ago

IMHO Linux has the better license. Not sure if I'm in the minority with this opinion?

auslander 8y ago
GPL (distribute your code) is better than BSD permissive (do what you want)? For whom?
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  For almost all of us. Companies extend the BSD OSs with proprietary additions, then abandon the work and it gets lost. With Linux, everyone is forced to play nice and release under the GPL, and the work gets to live as long as people value it. Hence the Linux kernel snowballing and taking over the world, whereas the BSDs have not, despite being at least as strong technically. The better Linux gets, the more people target it, and the virtuous cycle continues. Additionally, as it grows bigger and bigger, the more of the proprietary competition it crushes underfoot (sorry Solaris), and the more traction FOSS gets.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Hence why companies are now trying to move away from Linux on embedded, e.g. ARM mbed, RTOS, Zephyr, Fuchsia, ....
    - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
      Sure, Linux doesn't have a total monopoly in every domain. Sony used FreeBSD as the basis of the OSs of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4, for instance, and the work they did will never be contributed back. I don't see any proprietary Unix seriously competing with Linux any time soon though.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        The OSes that I have listed have all BSD style licenses, nothing proprietary about them as such. As for competition with proprietary UNIX, probably not against Aix or HP-UX as they survive on maintenance contracts for big customers like banks and telecommunication companies, but Linux is still no match for high integrity computing OSes, many of which are micro-kernels with POSIX userspace available as possible API.

MaxBarraclough 8y ago

> It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. I'm not sure that's fair. Linux has snowballed, whereas OpenBSD hasn't. Linux is a much larger system. Is it surprising you find OpenBSD to be tidier?

reacharavindh 8y ago

It's not fair to compare the two. I love OpenBSD for use cases where I care about correctness, stability, security even at the cost of performance or the having the latest feature set. Firewall, DNS, HTTPD and the like. However, when it comes to running scientific applications and squeezing out last bits of performance or servers where people expect stuff to "just work, and if doesn't do apt-get blah", it's Linux that takes the cake. FreeBSD and ZFS - the best I've worked with for Network Attached Storage. Can't believe it is just free.

ams6110 8y ago
Do you have a preferred recipe for FreeBSD/ZFS NAS? Is it FreeNAS?
- reacharavindh 8y ago
  I don't use FreeNAS. I run FreeBSD and ZFS myself. ZFS file server: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ ZFS file server performance: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/

kurtisc 8y ago

I've never understood why the end users of these free and libre kernels feel the need to fight so much.

caf 8y ago
I'm not sure, but I bet it's the same reason why (some of) the end users of, say, Boeing and Airbus aircraft feel the need to fight so much as well.

h1d 8y ago

> Linux is a depressing mess Citation or you only heard it. Not even going to poke on your rest of statements.