3 ms·

A Thinkpad that runs OpenBSD! OpenBSD developers mostly use Thinkpads, so everything works - suspend, hibernation, wifi, camera, etc. Packages for firefox, chr

A Thinkpad that runs OpenBSD! OpenBSD developers mostly use Thinkpads, so everything works - suspend, hibernation, wifi, camera, etc. Packages for firefox, chrome, and all the usual other open source software are just a pkg_add command away. Two commands and a reboot to upgrade the system and all installed apps a couple times a year. It might not be the right OS if you are a gamer, or you gotta have the latest phone-app-thingy, but if you're a unix person and want a rock solid well organized and documented system that you can trust it's bliss.

poletopole 6y ago
OpenBSD is admirable in that it’s conservative and just works compared to what you see in some but not all linux distros. However, is package management truly as sublime as you mention compared to what you would find in Linux—such as apt? And two, does OpenBSD have good if any support for containers?
- mikem170 6y ago
  It's not just the packages. The whole system is as simple and straight forward as it can be. It didn't need many tweaks, and I know everything it's doing. Openbsd just makes me happy :-) I've stuck with pre-compiled packages, and that's as easy as can be. I've only needed the pkg_info, pkg_add, and pkg_delete commands. There's a syspatch command to pull down OS security updates and upgrade to new releases. After new releases the fw_update command updates any firmware packages, and pkg-add -ui updates all packages. The faq pages have more info on this, and a lot of other system setup stuff [0]. (Extra info: Packages are pre-compiled binaries from the openbsd ports collection [1]. This ports collection can be installed and used to build stuff from source, and more closely track updates. Each app has a sub-dir under the ports directory with a makefile to download source code and compile/install everything to the right place, handle dependencies, etc. Packages are so easy, and I've never needed to get involved with ports. I've used ports on freebsd and can appreciate the value of them, if someone were to need them.) I don't have much first hand experience with openbsd containers. The system makes use of chroot [2] for daemons like httpd, running executables as a separate user restricted to a specified userland root directory, and I've played with this. There's also vmm [3], which can run openbsd and linux virtual machines. Apparently vmm allows for docker to run on openbsd [4]. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html [1] https://openports.se/ https://openports.se/ [2] https://man.openbsd.org/chroot https://man.openbsd.org/chroot [3] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html [4] https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-current-c620513b8110 https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-curre...
smabie 6y ago
I love OpenBSD but it's not very good for professional work, especially involving ml/scientific computing. No CUDA, and performance is pretty bad all around. It is superbly designed and probably the highest quality Unix around. It's unfortunate that Linux ever gained traction.
- mikem170 6y ago
  I was curious about what kind of performance problems you bumped into, outside of the obvious non-existent CUDA support? I ask because I had the impression that openbsd was doing ok in this regard. I use it for development and running apps with a lot of concurrent processes and hadn't noticed any problems. These benchmarks [0] have it doing better than almost all linux distributions when it comes to compilation times (but I know benchmarks are not always as objective as they could be). My youtubes and media players run great :-) It's been a while since I did any heavy networking, but I never had problems/surprises there as long as I spec'd out appropriate hardware, in particular the pf firewall and the hw accelerated ipsec and qos configs which I got pretty far into were outstanding, better than cisco hardware costing a lot more at the time. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsds-phoronix-14&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsds-pho...
  - smabie 6y ago
    my workload is heavily compute constrained and I notice a big difference in the performance/time of my analyses on OpenBSD vs Linux. Most other people probably wouldn't notice it that much though. Edit: tbqh I haven't used openBSD in a couple years, so things might have (probably?) changed since then.

poletopole 6y ago

OpenBSD is admirable in that it’s conservative and just works compared to what you see in some but not all linux distros. However, is package management truly as sublime as you mention compared to what you would find in Linux—such as apt? And two, does OpenBSD have good if any support for containers?

mikem170 6y ago
It's not just the packages. The whole system is as simple and straight forward as it can be. It didn't need many tweaks, and I know everything it's doing. Openbsd just makes me happy :-) I've stuck with pre-compiled packages, and that's as easy as can be. I've only needed the pkg_info, pkg_add, and pkg_delete commands. There's a syspatch command to pull down OS security updates and upgrade to new releases. After new releases the fw_update command updates any firmware packages, and pkg-add -ui updates all packages. The faq pages have more info on this, and a lot of other system setup stuff [0]. (Extra info: Packages are pre-compiled binaries from the openbsd ports collection [1]. This ports collection can be installed and used to build stuff from source, and more closely track updates. Each app has a sub-dir under the ports directory with a makefile to download source code and compile/install everything to the right place, handle dependencies, etc. Packages are so easy, and I've never needed to get involved with ports. I've used ports on freebsd and can appreciate the value of them, if someone were to need them.) I don't have much first hand experience with openbsd containers. The system makes use of chroot [2] for daemons like httpd, running executables as a separate user restricted to a specified userland root directory, and I've played with this. There's also vmm [3], which can run openbsd and linux virtual machines. Apparently vmm allows for docker to run on openbsd [4]. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html [1] https://openports.se/ https://openports.se/ [2] https://man.openbsd.org/chroot https://man.openbsd.org/chroot [3] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html [4] https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-current-c620513b8110 https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-curre...

smabie 6y ago

I love OpenBSD but it's not very good for professional work, especially involving ml/scientific computing. No CUDA, and performance is pretty bad all around. It is superbly designed and probably the highest quality Unix around. It's unfortunate that Linux ever gained traction.

mikem170 6y ago
I was curious about what kind of performance problems you bumped into, outside of the obvious non-existent CUDA support? I ask because I had the impression that openbsd was doing ok in this regard. I use it for development and running apps with a lot of concurrent processes and hadn't noticed any problems. These benchmarks [0] have it doing better than almost all linux distributions when it comes to compilation times (but I know benchmarks are not always as objective as they could be). My youtubes and media players run great :-) It's been a while since I did any heavy networking, but I never had problems/surprises there as long as I spec'd out appropriate hardware, in particular the pf firewall and the hw accelerated ipsec and qos configs which I got pretty far into were outstanding, better than cisco hardware costing a lot more at the time. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsds-phoronix-14&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsds-pho...
- smabie 6y ago
  my workload is heavily compute constrained and I notice a big difference in the performance/time of my analyses on OpenBSD vs Linux. Most other people probably wouldn't notice it that much though. Edit: tbqh I haven't used openBSD in a couple years, so things might have (probably?) changed since then.