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I've grown to love OpenBSD recently (and BSDs in general). I started life using Windows all the time, switched to Linux when I went to university, had a fling w

I've grown to love OpenBSD recently (and BSDs in general). I started life using Windows all the time, switched to Linux when I went to university, had a fling with Macs for a few years, then almost exclusive with Linux again for years. In the last several years I discovered the BSDSs, and OpenBSD is now my daily driver. It is so beautifully simple. Configuring a secure server is easy. The config files are consistent. It just works. I highly recommend installing and playing around with it. Like Lisp, even if you don't go permanent with it, the encounter will change how you think and what you expect in terms of elegance from every other system you use.

120photo 6y ago
FreeBSD was the system where I really really learned to use UNIX like systems. I had a home server and followed book "How to Build a Server with FreeBSD 7" and that was a helpful guide. Michael Lucas' "Absolute FreeBSD" and his other BSD books are amazing resources. The FreeBSD documentation is also so well written there is little room for 3rd party books. The main reason I don't use BSD (well other than mac OS and iOS which you can argue are a fork of BSD) and go with Linux is because of work and if I do use Linux on a personal station there is just so much more software and more support. I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like.
- mikece 6y ago
  "I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like." While I can see where both kernel and userland being built by a single team can have advantages, why is it necessarily the Linux approach to bolting the userland items as needed necessarily a bad thing? If a fictitious userland app such as `hnget` doesn't have good documentation is that a weakness of the linux distro or the makers of `hnget`? Sure, having one team brings the opportunity to leverage peer pressure to improve documentation or even to impose a "system level of docs quality".... but is it really so bad in Linux-land?
  - brobdingnagians 6y ago
    One example I like is the FreeBSD security page. It gives a nice overview of different things to think about and configure in relation to security. It brings a lot of information about separate systems into one conceptual place, which helps know if you are missing something obvious.
  - massysett 6y ago
    As a user the end result is the same: my system has this thing ‘hnget’ that I need to use, yet it’s not documented. I don’t care whose fault it is. Linux land can certainly be bad in the sense that many distributors don’t document the system. They just bolt stuff together, sometimes with multiple layers of bolting (Distro X is based on Ubuntu that’s based on Debian, so which method am I “supposed to” use? If I use this new shiny package manager front end, will that interfere with the old command-line tool that works on Debian?) For this reason I shy away from derivative distributions. But even then, the Linux user land and kernel are not models of superior documentation.
  - linguae 6y ago
    I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also in situations where I have Linux hardware support but not for FreeBSD (I prefer Linux for laptops over FreeBSD). It's not a bad thing that Linux's core utilities are not developed alongside the kernel; in fact, part of what makes the GNU toolkit so flexible is the fact that it runs on a variety of Unix-like operating systems instead of just Linux, a great thing for BSD users as well as users of lesser-used Unix-like operating systems like Minix, Solaris, and GNU Hurd. But with that being said, what I love about FreeBSD is that the core utilities are very well documented. I believe the quality of FreeBSD's documentation is an artifact of the BSDs long-standing culture of providing high-quality documentation; some of the man pages have origins in AT&T Unix and the days of BSD up to 4.4BSD, but it's been updated over all these years to reflect changes. The AT&T Unix versions and the Berkeley-developed BSDs always had wonderful documentation, much of it written by Unix legends like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and others. Even the post-Berkeley documentation still captures this spirit. Plus, I happen to prefer man pages to the info pages that GNU utilities tend to prefer since I can never remember the keys used for navigating the hyperlinks found in info pages. I also like how FreeBSD ships with some traditional supplementary Unix documents, which have helpful tutorials for classic Unix tools. The FreeBSD handbook is very well written, and it can be easily downloaded. For people who sometimes need to do kernel hacking, there's Marshall Kirk McKusick et al.'s wonderfully written "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition," which I have a copy of. I find the source code of FreeBSD easier to read than the source code of Linux. FreeBSD reminds me a lot of PostgreSQL, another high-quality open source project with excellent documentation that happens to also derive from UC Berkeley.
valarauko 6y ago
I've been on linux for many years, and have been growing curious about BSDs, but confused over the various BSDs variants. I'm still unclear of how exactly BSDs are superior to linux. Could you shine a light on the different BSDS, and perhaps a recommendation?
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  The biggest thing you'll find over Linux (IMO) is the advantage of having one team build things. Linux the OS is actually the Linux kernel + userspace software, and those pieces are built independently. With the BSDs, the team is building the userspace and kernel together. You end up with a small, well-designed system that fits together nicely. As an example, OpenBSD gives you a HTTP server, load balancer, and firewall right out of the box – and they all make use of pledge(2) and privsep and other security designs in a very consistent manner. And the documentation for the whole system is top-notch: you can read their manpages and not have to resort to Googling things. I'd recommend you spin up OpenBSD on a VPC (try Vultr or DigitalOcean) and kick it around.
  - sn 6y ago
    One thing we couldn't figure out from the documentation is encrypted root with serial console: https://prgmr.com/blog/openbsd/2020/05/08/openbsd-encrypted-root.html https://prgmr.com/blog/openbsd/2020/05/08/openbsd-encrypted-... I have gotten it on someone's TODO list to upstream that work though it hasn't happened yet.
  - danieldk 6y ago
    Linux the OS is actually the Linux kernel + userspace software, and those pieces are built independently. With the BSDs, the team is building the userspace and kernel together. You end up with a small, well-designed system that fits together nicely. That's a blessing and a curse. While the BSD approach leads to more consistency, the Linux approach allows the ecosystem to move faster. In BSD projects, progress is often hampered, because proposals to drastically change subsystems is met with inertia, and then nothing happens. In Linux the inertia is there, but nobody stops people from implementing an alternative implementation, because the pieces are relatively decoupled, and then convince distributions to adopt the replacement. This is why Linux ecosystem went from System V init -> Upstart -> systemd. Similarly, X11 -> Mir/Wayland -> Wayland (although Wayland could be adopted as a default on BSDs as well). Or chroot -> LXC -> Docker (or more generally cgroups + user namespaces). Although controversial (every change leads to some controversy), technically systemd and Wayland are substantial improvements to their predecessors. Of course, the downside is that the integration is left to the distributors and the documentation may be inconsistent or uneven. --- Another thing to take into accounts when looking at BSDs is that the BSDs have far fewer contributors than the Linux ecosystem. So, you might find that it lacks basic things such as 802.11ac support (though there has recently been movement in FreeBSD again) or support for the newest GPUs.
victorgama 6y ago
Out of curiosity: what do you work with? Asking since I’d like to move to OpenBSD as well, but several tools are not available. For instance, the company I work for relies heavily on Docker. :(
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  Yeah, that has been an issue at times. My team uses Docker, luckily it is only a few applications and it was easy to set them up to just be run directly. For heavy Docker usage though, that could be a deal breaker. I also had to custom compile the pty4j and purejavacomm libraries to get the jetbrains IDEs to work to my satisfaction.
- phone8675309 6y ago
  Not OP, but daily OpenBSD user. My desktop machine runs OpenBSD (after getting off of OS X) but I have a few headless Linux machines for things that only run on it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

120photo 6y ago

FreeBSD was the system where I really really learned to use UNIX like systems. I had a home server and followed book "How to Build a Server with FreeBSD 7" and that was a helpful guide. Michael Lucas' "Absolute FreeBSD" and his other BSD books are amazing resources. The FreeBSD documentation is also so well written there is little room for 3rd party books. The main reason I don't use BSD (well other than mac OS and iOS which you can argue are a fork of BSD) and go with Linux is because of work and if I do use Linux on a personal station there is just so much more software and more support. I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like.

mikece 6y ago
"I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like." While I can see where both kernel and userland being built by a single team can have advantages, why is it necessarily the Linux approach to bolting the userland items as needed necessarily a bad thing? If a fictitious userland app such as `hnget` doesn't have good documentation is that a weakness of the linux distro or the makers of `hnget`? Sure, having one team brings the opportunity to leverage peer pressure to improve documentation or even to impose a "system level of docs quality".... but is it really so bad in Linux-land?
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  One example I like is the FreeBSD security page. It gives a nice overview of different things to think about and configure in relation to security. It brings a lot of information about separate systems into one conceptual place, which helps know if you are missing something obvious.
- massysett 6y ago
  As a user the end result is the same: my system has this thing ‘hnget’ that I need to use, yet it’s not documented. I don’t care whose fault it is. Linux land can certainly be bad in the sense that many distributors don’t document the system. They just bolt stuff together, sometimes with multiple layers of bolting (Distro X is based on Ubuntu that’s based on Debian, so which method am I “supposed to” use? If I use this new shiny package manager front end, will that interfere with the old command-line tool that works on Debian?) For this reason I shy away from derivative distributions. But even then, the Linux user land and kernel are not models of superior documentation.
- linguae 6y ago
  I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also in situations where I have Linux hardware support but not for FreeBSD (I prefer Linux for laptops over FreeBSD). It's not a bad thing that Linux's core utilities are not developed alongside the kernel; in fact, part of what makes the GNU toolkit so flexible is the fact that it runs on a variety of Unix-like operating systems instead of just Linux, a great thing for BSD users as well as users of lesser-used Unix-like operating systems like Minix, Solaris, and GNU Hurd. But with that being said, what I love about FreeBSD is that the core utilities are very well documented. I believe the quality of FreeBSD's documentation is an artifact of the BSDs long-standing culture of providing high-quality documentation; some of the man pages have origins in AT&T Unix and the days of BSD up to 4.4BSD, but it's been updated over all these years to reflect changes. The AT&T Unix versions and the Berkeley-developed BSDs always had wonderful documentation, much of it written by Unix legends like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and others. Even the post-Berkeley documentation still captures this spirit. Plus, I happen to prefer man pages to the info pages that GNU utilities tend to prefer since I can never remember the keys used for navigating the hyperlinks found in info pages. I also like how FreeBSD ships with some traditional supplementary Unix documents, which have helpful tutorials for classic Unix tools. The FreeBSD handbook is very well written, and it can be easily downloaded. For people who sometimes need to do kernel hacking, there's Marshall Kirk McKusick et al.'s wonderfully written "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition," which I have a copy of. I find the source code of FreeBSD easier to read than the source code of Linux. FreeBSD reminds me a lot of PostgreSQL, another high-quality open source project with excellent documentation that happens to also derive from UC Berkeley.

valarauko 6y ago

I've been on linux for many years, and have been growing curious about BSDs, but confused over the various BSDs variants. I'm still unclear of how exactly BSDs are superior to linux. Could you shine a light on the different BSDS, and perhaps a recommendation?

owenmarshall 6y ago
The biggest thing you'll find over Linux (IMO) is the advantage of having one team build things. Linux the OS is actually the Linux kernel + userspace software, and those pieces are built independently. With the BSDs, the team is building the userspace and kernel together. You end up with a small, well-designed system that fits together nicely. As an example, OpenBSD gives you a HTTP server, load balancer, and firewall right out of the box – and they all make use of pledge(2) and privsep and other security designs in a very consistent manner. And the documentation for the whole system is top-notch: you can read their manpages and not have to resort to Googling things. I'd recommend you spin up OpenBSD on a VPC (try Vultr or DigitalOcean) and kick it around.
- sn 6y ago
  One thing we couldn't figure out from the documentation is encrypted root with serial console: https://prgmr.com/blog/openbsd/2020/05/08/openbsd-encrypted-root.html https://prgmr.com/blog/openbsd/2020/05/08/openbsd-encrypted-... I have gotten it on someone's TODO list to upstream that work though it hasn't happened yet.
- danieldk 6y ago
  Linux the OS is actually the Linux kernel + userspace software, and those pieces are built independently. With the BSDs, the team is building the userspace and kernel together. You end up with a small, well-designed system that fits together nicely. That's a blessing and a curse. While the BSD approach leads to more consistency, the Linux approach allows the ecosystem to move faster. In BSD projects, progress is often hampered, because proposals to drastically change subsystems is met with inertia, and then nothing happens. In Linux the inertia is there, but nobody stops people from implementing an alternative implementation, because the pieces are relatively decoupled, and then convince distributions to adopt the replacement. This is why Linux ecosystem went from System V init -> Upstart -> systemd. Similarly, X11 -> Mir/Wayland -> Wayland (although Wayland could be adopted as a default on BSDs as well). Or chroot -> LXC -> Docker (or more generally cgroups + user namespaces). Although controversial (every change leads to some controversy), technically systemd and Wayland are substantial improvements to their predecessors. Of course, the downside is that the integration is left to the distributors and the documentation may be inconsistent or uneven. --- Another thing to take into accounts when looking at BSDs is that the BSDs have far fewer contributors than the Linux ecosystem. So, you might find that it lacks basic things such as 802.11ac support (though there has recently been movement in FreeBSD again) or support for the newest GPUs.

victorgama 6y ago

Out of curiosity: what do you work with? Asking since I’d like to move to OpenBSD as well, but several tools are not available. For instance, the company I work for relies heavily on Docker. :(

brobdingnagians 6y ago
Yeah, that has been an issue at times. My team uses Docker, luckily it is only a few applications and it was easy to set them up to just be run directly. For heavy Docker usage though, that could be a deal breaker. I also had to custom compile the pty4j and purejavacomm libraries to get the jetbrains IDEs to work to my satisfaction.
phone8675309 6y ago
Not OP, but daily OpenBSD user. My desktop machine runs OpenBSD (after getting off of OS X) but I have a few headless Linux machines for things that only run on it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]