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

by nanna 5y ago

drewpc 5y ago
Be curious; learn it. Figure out pros/cons for yourself. You'll have more breadth of knowledge, more depth in specific areas, and will likely make better architecture choices in the future because of it.
nix23 5y ago
No why? If your happy an you know it, clap your hands. But if you want to try out something else, clap your hand and start installing, why? https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
Koshkin 5y ago
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).
- pastrami_panda 5y ago
  > Coherency What does this refer to in this context?
  - tbrock 5y ago
    Things are where you’d expect, patterns and conventions cary on throughout the system, etc… Vs the disjoint feeling linux has.
    - JoshTriplett 5y ago
      Part of the job of a Linux distribution is to provide policy, conventions, and similar consistency. If you install everything from sources directly, or directly from upstream vendors, you may get inconsistencies, but if you install everything from your Linux distribution, you should get reasonable consistency, just as if you install everything from your BSD distribution.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        even in a distro, you'll get various syntax variations for instance
        JoshTriplett 5y ago
        Syntax of what?
        agumonkey 5y ago
        cli programs, they all have different ways to handle arguments, options, help ps: another instance, albeit not a BSD strength either, would be data format, every output is different, I, like a few people too wanted some json as pivot representation to cut the thousands of papercuts, that kind of uniformity is what I expect from "system"
        evh 5y ago
        Lots (just some? most? I haven't really used it much) of FreeBSD system utilities are using libxo for output, so you can use e.g. ps --libxo json and get json output, or xml/html
        agumonkey 5y ago
        I didn't know bsd already adopted it, only heard a few passing mentions. That's great, though, and note that I mostly meant that about linux.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - zokula 5y ago
      I already have that with Linux.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > ZFS NB: Not on OpenBSD.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  > 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 case.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    It's coherent with the other ZFS implementations in Linux and Solaris.
    - nrr 5y ago
      Likewise, apropos storage systems that handle logical volume management, Linux's LVM tools are extremely reminiscent of those from HP-UX[0], and NetBSD's LVM guide explicitly calls out their tooling being built from Linux's lvm2tools[1]. There's a modest amount of precedent for this kind of thing. 0: lvcreate(1M) from HP-UX 11i https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html 1: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-lvm.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-lvm.html
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    > 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.
yung_steezy 5y ago
I would recommend FreeBSD if you were going to try one of them. The BSD experience a bit like using linux was like 15 years ago. Online DRM for sites like Netflix will not work for example. Specifically in the case of FreeBSD the filesystem is well curated and cohesive, if you feel a file ought to be in a certain location it is usually there. Additionally the manpages and docs are a joy to read. I'm less familiar with OpenBSD but it is similar in terms of prioritising being a cohesive operating system and docs. Some design choices the team have made for reasons such as security make the system feel sluggish by modern standards, even compared to other BSDs. You might get a lot of mileage out of it if you enjoy old school C programming and reading the source code for coreutils libraries.
- ToddWBurgess 5y ago
  I got FreeBSD running on a Raspberry PI. It isn't too hard to install and get up and running. I primarily use FreeBSD on the Pi for ARM assembly programming. All BSDs are great for devs.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    ooc why didn't you try NetBSD? Isn't running on every little device kinda their wheelhouse?
    - ToddWBurgess 5y ago
      I did try NetBSD first on the Pi but the install wasn't working for me. Getting FreeBSD up and running on the Raspberry Pi was a lot less painful. If I really want to kick around NetBSD I can run an instance of it in GNU Boxes on one of my Linux boxes.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  >prioritising being a cohesive operating system and docs This is one of the areas where OpenBSD really shines. Their documentation is really good. FreeBSD is also quite good, but I've been consistently impressed with OpenBSD's docs since 2.5. Linux distros can't reach the same level of quality due to being less cohesive at the base, though they do make up for it with quantity. You can search for most Linux issues and find an answer.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
I love OpenBSD because it is as close to "just works" as it gets in an ideal world. I love using it for my personal website because it is very easy to get a proper overview over the OS as a whole and because it comes with some of my favourite pieces of software and all I need for a personal website is part of the system: httpd, pf etc. Also OpenBSD has some of the best docs out there, I rarely need to websearch anything. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, so I rarely get to spin up OpenBSD outside of that due to a number of reasons like a lack of filesystems for interoperability (USB media) and firmware drivers (got to be specific in the hardware you buy for it).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
m4r35n357 5y ago
I use Debian and love OpenBSD.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  This has a rather deep philosophical basis.
- hda111 5y ago
  Savaged by systemd
waynesonfire 5y ago
Im a life long linux user and decided to use FreeBSD as a platform for my most recent hobby project. It was surpising how enlightening it was to use a different tool. It does somethings the same way, somethings different, what was most pleasant was discovering the things it did better. I don't think you can read about it, really worth experiencing this.
gigatexal 5y ago
This link is for OpenBSD but I have the most experience with FreeBSD. Reasons to try out a BSD, even FreeBSD: 1. ZFS -- by far and away the best filesystem there is. (A hella partisan take but try it out and you'll likely fall in love like the rest of us did) 2. The handbook. The handbook is gold. It's up there with some of the best documentation available. 3. Less fragmentation. The BSDs have 3 main derivatives: NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. (There are others but these are the main) 4. If you like LXD then you'll love Jails. 5. The BSD license. (If being the most free means something to you. I kind of like it but maybe this isn't a selling point.) 6. Can be rolling or used in an LTS fashion. It's rather easy to track -current all the time or just stick with a stable release and do periodic binary package updates.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yrui 5y ago
I've been running OpenBSD more than 15 years, and it does have a learning curve. One area to consider as a happy Debian desktop user is using OpenBSD as a router OS. PC Engines (I have no affiliation to them) makes a very nice router called "Alix" and OpenBSD works well on it. Previously, people were installing it on Soekris routers before they went out of business. OpenBSD's firewall pf is by far my favorite, and it and OpenBSD have a lot of nice networking features and tools to tinker with. It's free of blobs (in the default install), free of known bugs (in the default install--but generally your router will work well with only the default install), and configured to be reasonably secure by default. The documentation is also frequently praised. How many other modern, full-fledged, well-maintained and open code OSes run in 32 Mb of RAM?
- thijsvandien 5y ago
  ALIX is EOL. Nowadays you'll want to use their APU (excellent too).
upofadown 5y ago
I don't care that much about the security claims but I have to acknowledge that they are probably true to some extent. I value OpenBSD most for its minimalism. The OpenBSD project seems to have managed to avoid the feature bloat that other systems are now suffering from. You have to learn it, but there is not a lot there to learn. Once you figure out how to set it up then the audio just works. That is a killer feature compared to the situation I had to deal with when I was doing Debian on the desktop.
School-Cotton 5y ago
You’re obviously curious and want to try it, or you wouldn’t have posted that, so why not go for it? You have nothing to lose. For me the coolest thing about OpenBSD is it’s the simplest OS that is still of practical use (i.e., not counting ones that are purely for research or education). So if you’re curious about how any part of the system works, it’s easy to just dive into /usr/src and figure it out. It’s also entirely configured via simple text files rather than some opaque systemd monstrosity.
- tazjin 5y ago
  systemd is configured via simple text files
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    What simple text file is, for example, the list of WiFi SSIDs to try to connect to stored in?
    - nix23 5y ago
      /etc/systemd/network/25-wireless.network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-networkd#network_files https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-networkd#network_fi... But simple i would not call it...compared to bsd ;)
      - enriquto 5y ago
        This file does not exist on my rather plain ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I tried finding similarly named files, to no avail. Knowing the notorious ADHD of the systemd developership, I wouldn't be surprised if this file is moved, renamed, and uses a different format every six months.
        nix23 5y ago
        /lib/systemd/network http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man5/systemd.network.5.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man5/systemd.netwo... or find / -name '*.network' But yeah, BSD's would have them at one place -> /etc ...linux-distro standardization is a terrible mess.
yabones 5y ago
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/bin/bash`) Think of it like reading Wikipedia, no matter which page you read it seems like it was written by the same person. That's the kind of consistency that OpenBSD intends to create.
- adamrt 5y ago
  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 :).
  - chasil 5y ago
    ...and that ksh descended from pdksh, and is distributed as the oksh portable project here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh https://github.com/ibara/oksh The MirBSD Korn Shell also descended from pdksh, and it can be found here: http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm I don't know about the feature differences and code quality between these two; they both implement most of ksh88, and a small amount of ksh93. I prefer mksh when I need something more than a POSIX shell.
  - yabones 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
tharne 5y ago
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 daily driver. One really cool thing about OpenBSD is that the OpenBSD devs use the OS as their daily driver. You'll likely keep hearing about how good the OpenBSD man pages are. I always thought this was a weird thing to mention and make a big deal about. But holy crap, the OpenBSD documentation is amazing. Reading it has definitely made my own documentation at work significantly better. The downside? There are a couple. The biggest two are that, 1) you're not going to find a lot of the software you might normally use; and 2) The performance is not great and battery life is not very good.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
  > 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 :)
fbhabbed 5y ago
Definitely try it in a VM first or at least image your Debian drive before going at it. You are going to miss your perfectly working Debian install
tomc1985 5y ago
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!
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
Easy: text log files, text config files, no systemd.
puffyn 5y ago
I can only comment on OpenBSD. It’s a minimal unix system. I like the minimalism. OpenBSD is mainly a router/server/firewall system but you can use OpenBSD on a desktop. If your hardware is supported everything works out of the box. Firefox/Chromium have pledge/unveil security which prevent them from accessing your file system. Something like apparmor but works put of the box. However it’s not designed as a desktop system (installing a browser introduces many security risks). They have some additional security features like encrypted swap and others. In terms of security, the OpenBSD kernel is a lot smaller than the linux kernel. Can’t have holes in code that doesn’t exist. All together it’s just a minimal small unix system. If you want to use it on the desktop, you can use it for basic surfing or 90s video games. I’m using it for fun mainly. There is no jails / docker / virtualbox so I don’t use it for coding. OpenBSD isn’t really a desktop OS, desktop users typically use FreeBSD because there are many more packages. FreeBSD is a completely different OS.
- anthk 5y ago
  >If you want to use it on the desktop, you can use it for basic surfing or 90s video games Why? You have PPSSPP, Dolphin, maybe some current-gen emulators, and lots of sourc ports. And fnaify for Mono games. https://playonbsd.com/shopping_guide/ https://playonbsd.com/shopping_guide/
- amatecha 5y ago
  There is virtualization with vmm: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html
- snvzz 5y ago
  >basic surfing With recent versions of chrome/firefox and 3d acceleration on amd/intel graphics, you're not limited to "basic surfing". The only reason I can think of that you would say that is that perhaps you do e.g. have an NVIDIA card (why...) and thus you're stuck with no accelerated graphics.
- lcall 5y ago
  After learning some things (see my umask comment etc, elsewhere here on this page, and my way around the FAQs etc), I have found it very useful for my desktop and am happy with it. Even before I learned things like tmux and fvwm, xfce etc worked nicely. (Having said that, my needs might be atypical.) Edit/ps: last I knew, it had something like 10_000 binary packages available, in addition to the base system.
eacafdcbac 5y ago
Playing with OpenBSD will be a learning experience. For me, that's usually enough to install something on a non-daily driver machine. Are you a software engineer or CS student? If so, I'd say that OpenBSD really shines in code simplicity, clarity, and consistency. This is also a matter of taste. What drew me in initially was the quality and consistency of the kernel source code, consistent high standards in documentation, and the design of system interfaces and libraries. I like being able to answer my own questions and I find that easier in OpenBSD than in Linux. Sometimes I sit for hours and simply flip back and forth between documentation and code exploring how things work. I feel that this level of consistency and availability of information within the system feed creative urges on my part. I like to write code and I feel like I have an easier time doing that in OpenBSD than Linux (again, a matter of tastes.) This is in large part because my workflow tends to happen at the terminal. I would be surprised to find that VSCode, Slack, Discord, and other electron-y applications can be made to work in OpenBSD at all... maybe they do, but I've never felt the need to try, so if they don't I'm fine with that. I think OpenBSD is well adapted to a specific kind of user and a specific kind of problems. If you're paranoid, or a developer, or just like the terminal window, or prefer design consistency over broad compatibility and feature variety, you might find that you really enjoy using OpenBSD. By all means, give it a spin if for no other reason than to learn about a thing that's out there that a bunch of people enjoy. If OpenBSD is not for you, that's okay too. I don't think that the user base, developers, or community have ever been looking run campaigns aimed at growing the popularity of the system. For me that's a good thing, the developers seem less prone to chasing the next thing that will expand their share in a market, and are more focused on making a thing they want to use - which translates well for me. YMMV.

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

by nanna 5y ago

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

Be curious; learn it. Figure out pros/cons for yourself. You'll have more breadth of knowledge, more depth in specific areas, and will likely make better architecture choices in the future because of it.

nix23 5y ago

No why? If your happy an you know it, clap your hands. But if you want to try out something else, clap your hand and start installing, why? https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

Koshkin 5y ago

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).

pastrami_panda 5y ago
> Coherency What does this refer to in this context?
- tbrock 5y ago
  Things are where you’d expect, patterns and conventions cary on throughout the system, etc… Vs the disjoint feeling linux has.
  - JoshTriplett 5y ago
    Part of the job of a Linux distribution is to provide policy, conventions, and similar consistency. If you install everything from sources directly, or directly from upstream vendors, you may get inconsistencies, but if you install everything from your Linux distribution, you should get reasonable consistency, just as if you install everything from your BSD distribution.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      even in a distro, you'll get various syntax variations for instance
      - JoshTriplett 5y ago
        Syntax of what?
        agumonkey 5y ago
        cli programs, they all have different ways to handle arguments, options, help ps: another instance, albeit not a BSD strength either, would be data format, every output is different, I, like a few people too wanted some json as pivot representation to cut the thousands of papercuts, that kind of uniformity is what I expect from "system"
        evh 5y ago
        Lots (just some? most? I haven't really used it much) of FreeBSD system utilities are using libxo for output, so you can use e.g. ps --libxo json and get json output, or xml/html
        agumonkey 5y ago
        I didn't know bsd already adopted it, only heard a few passing mentions. That's great, though, and note that I mostly meant that about linux.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - zokula 5y ago
    I already have that with Linux.
School-Cotton 5y ago
> ZFS NB: Not on OpenBSD.
mrweasel 5y ago
> 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 case.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  It's coherent with the other ZFS implementations in Linux and Solaris.
  - nrr 5y ago
    Likewise, apropos storage systems that handle logical volume management, Linux's LVM tools are extremely reminiscent of those from HP-UX[0], and NetBSD's LVM guide explicitly calls out their tooling being built from Linux's lvm2tools[1]. There's a modest amount of precedent for this kind of thing. 0: lvcreate(1M) from HP-UX 11i https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html 1: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-lvm.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-lvm.html
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > 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.

yung_steezy 5y ago

I would recommend FreeBSD if you were going to try one of them. The BSD experience a bit like using linux was like 15 years ago. Online DRM for sites like Netflix will not work for example. Specifically in the case of FreeBSD the filesystem is well curated and cohesive, if you feel a file ought to be in a certain location it is usually there. Additionally the manpages and docs are a joy to read. I'm less familiar with OpenBSD but it is similar in terms of prioritising being a cohesive operating system and docs. Some design choices the team have made for reasons such as security make the system feel sluggish by modern standards, even compared to other BSDs. You might get a lot of mileage out of it if you enjoy old school C programming and reading the source code for coreutils libraries.

ToddWBurgess 5y ago
I got FreeBSD running on a Raspberry PI. It isn't too hard to install and get up and running. I primarily use FreeBSD on the Pi for ARM assembly programming. All BSDs are great for devs.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  ooc why didn't you try NetBSD? Isn't running on every little device kinda their wheelhouse?
  - ToddWBurgess 5y ago
    I did try NetBSD first on the Pi but the install wasn't working for me. Getting FreeBSD up and running on the Raspberry Pi was a lot less painful. If I really want to kick around NetBSD I can run an instance of it in GNU Boxes on one of my Linux boxes.
deltarholamda 5y ago
>prioritising being a cohesive operating system and docs This is one of the areas where OpenBSD really shines. Their documentation is really good. FreeBSD is also quite good, but I've been consistently impressed with OpenBSD's docs since 2.5. Linux distros can't reach the same level of quality due to being less cohesive at the base, though they do make up for it with quantity. You can search for most Linux issues and find an answer.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago

I love OpenBSD because it is as close to "just works" as it gets in an ideal world. I love using it for my personal website because it is very easy to get a proper overview over the OS as a whole and because it comes with some of my favourite pieces of software and all I need for a personal website is part of the system: httpd, pf etc. Also OpenBSD has some of the best docs out there, I rarely need to websearch anything. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, so I rarely get to spin up OpenBSD outside of that due to a number of reasons like a lack of filesystems for interoperability (USB media) and firmware drivers (got to be specific in the hardware you buy for it).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

m4r35n357 5y ago

I use Debian and love OpenBSD.

Koshkin 5y ago
This has a rather deep philosophical basis.
hda111 5y ago
Savaged by systemd

waynesonfire 5y ago

Im a life long linux user and decided to use FreeBSD as a platform for my most recent hobby project. It was surpising how enlightening it was to use a different tool. It does somethings the same way, somethings different, what was most pleasant was discovering the things it did better. I don't think you can read about it, really worth experiencing this.

gigatexal 5y ago

This link is for OpenBSD but I have the most experience with FreeBSD. Reasons to try out a BSD, even FreeBSD: 1. ZFS -- by far and away the best filesystem there is. (A hella partisan take but try it out and you'll likely fall in love like the rest of us did) 2. The handbook. The handbook is gold. It's up there with some of the best documentation available. 3. Less fragmentation. The BSDs have 3 main derivatives: NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. (There are others but these are the main) 4. If you like LXD then you'll love Jails. 5. The BSD license. (If being the most free means something to you. I kind of like it but maybe this isn't a selling point.) 6. Can be rolling or used in an LTS fashion. It's rather easy to track -current all the time or just stick with a stable release and do periodic binary package updates.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yrui 5y ago

I've been running OpenBSD more than 15 years, and it does have a learning curve. One area to consider as a happy Debian desktop user is using OpenBSD as a router OS. PC Engines (I have no affiliation to them) makes a very nice router called "Alix" and OpenBSD works well on it. Previously, people were installing it on Soekris routers before they went out of business. OpenBSD's firewall pf is by far my favorite, and it and OpenBSD have a lot of nice networking features and tools to tinker with. It's free of blobs (in the default install), free of known bugs (in the default install--but generally your router will work well with only the default install), and configured to be reasonably secure by default. The documentation is also frequently praised. How many other modern, full-fledged, well-maintained and open code OSes run in 32 Mb of RAM?

thijsvandien 5y ago
ALIX is EOL. Nowadays you'll want to use their APU (excellent too).

upofadown 5y ago

I don't care that much about the security claims but I have to acknowledge that they are probably true to some extent. I value OpenBSD most for its minimalism. The OpenBSD project seems to have managed to avoid the feature bloat that other systems are now suffering from. You have to learn it, but there is not a lot there to learn. Once you figure out how to set it up then the audio just works. That is a killer feature compared to the situation I had to deal with when I was doing Debian on the desktop.

School-Cotton 5y ago

You’re obviously curious and want to try it, or you wouldn’t have posted that, so why not go for it? You have nothing to lose. For me the coolest thing about OpenBSD is it’s the simplest OS that is still of practical use (i.e., not counting ones that are purely for research or education). So if you’re curious about how any part of the system works, it’s easy to just dive into /usr/src and figure it out. It’s also entirely configured via simple text files rather than some opaque systemd monstrosity.

tazjin 5y ago
systemd is configured via simple text files
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  What simple text file is, for example, the list of WiFi SSIDs to try to connect to stored in?
  - nix23 5y ago
    /etc/systemd/network/25-wireless.network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-networkd#network_files https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-networkd#network_fi... But simple i would not call it...compared to bsd ;)
    - enriquto 5y ago
      This file does not exist on my rather plain ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I tried finding similarly named files, to no avail. Knowing the notorious ADHD of the systemd developership, I wouldn't be surprised if this file is moved, renamed, and uses a different format every six months.
      - nix23 5y ago
        /lib/systemd/network http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man5/systemd.network.5.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man5/systemd.netwo... or find / -name '*.network' But yeah, BSD's would have them at one place -> /etc ...linux-distro standardization is a terrible mess.

yabones 5y ago

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/bin/bash`) Think of it like reading Wikipedia, no matter which page you read it seems like it was written by the same person. That's the kind of consistency that OpenBSD intends to create.

adamrt 5y ago
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 :).
- chasil 5y ago
  ...and that ksh descended from pdksh, and is distributed as the oksh portable project here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh https://github.com/ibara/oksh The MirBSD Korn Shell also descended from pdksh, and it can be found here: http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm I don't know about the feature differences and code quality between these two; they both implement most of ksh88, and a small amount of ksh93. I prefer mksh when I need something more than a POSIX shell.
- yabones 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

tharne 5y ago

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 daily driver. One really cool thing about OpenBSD is that the OpenBSD devs use the OS as their daily driver. You'll likely keep hearing about how good the OpenBSD man pages are. I always thought this was a weird thing to mention and make a big deal about. But holy crap, the OpenBSD documentation is amazing. Reading it has definitely made my own documentation at work significantly better. The downside? There are a couple. The biggest two are that, 1) you're not going to find a lot of the software you might normally use; and 2) The performance is not great and battery life is not very good.

35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
> 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 :)

fbhabbed 5y ago

Definitely try it in a VM first or at least image your Debian drive before going at it. You are going to miss your perfectly working Debian install

tomc1985 5y ago

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!

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

Easy: text log files, text config files, no systemd.

puffyn 5y ago

I can only comment on OpenBSD. It’s a minimal unix system. I like the minimalism. OpenBSD is mainly a router/server/firewall system but you can use OpenBSD on a desktop. If your hardware is supported everything works out of the box. Firefox/Chromium have pledge/unveil security which prevent them from accessing your file system. Something like apparmor but works put of the box. However it’s not designed as a desktop system (installing a browser introduces many security risks). They have some additional security features like encrypted swap and others. In terms of security, the OpenBSD kernel is a lot smaller than the linux kernel. Can’t have holes in code that doesn’t exist. All together it’s just a minimal small unix system. If you want to use it on the desktop, you can use it for basic surfing or 90s video games. I’m using it for fun mainly. There is no jails / docker / virtualbox so I don’t use it for coding. OpenBSD isn’t really a desktop OS, desktop users typically use FreeBSD because there are many more packages. FreeBSD is a completely different OS.

anthk 5y ago
>If you want to use it on the desktop, you can use it for basic surfing or 90s video games Why? You have PPSSPP, Dolphin, maybe some current-gen emulators, and lots of sourc ports. And fnaify for Mono games. https://playonbsd.com/shopping_guide/ https://playonbsd.com/shopping_guide/
amatecha 5y ago
There is virtualization with vmm: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html
snvzz 5y ago
>basic surfing With recent versions of chrome/firefox and 3d acceleration on amd/intel graphics, you're not limited to "basic surfing". The only reason I can think of that you would say that is that perhaps you do e.g. have an NVIDIA card (why...) and thus you're stuck with no accelerated graphics.
lcall 5y ago
After learning some things (see my umask comment etc, elsewhere here on this page, and my way around the FAQs etc), I have found it very useful for my desktop and am happy with it. Even before I learned things like tmux and fvwm, xfce etc worked nicely. (Having said that, my needs might be atypical.) Edit/ps: last I knew, it had something like 10_000 binary packages available, in addition to the base system.

eacafdcbac 5y ago

Playing with OpenBSD will be a learning experience. For me, that's usually enough to install something on a non-daily driver machine. Are you a software engineer or CS student? If so, I'd say that OpenBSD really shines in code simplicity, clarity, and consistency. This is also a matter of taste. What drew me in initially was the quality and consistency of the kernel source code, consistent high standards in documentation, and the design of system interfaces and libraries. I like being able to answer my own questions and I find that easier in OpenBSD than in Linux. Sometimes I sit for hours and simply flip back and forth between documentation and code exploring how things work. I feel that this level of consistency and availability of information within the system feed creative urges on my part. I like to write code and I feel like I have an easier time doing that in OpenBSD than Linux (again, a matter of tastes.) This is in large part because my workflow tends to happen at the terminal. I would be surprised to find that VSCode, Slack, Discord, and other electron-y applications can be made to work in OpenBSD at all... maybe they do, but I've never felt the need to try, so if they don't I'm fine with that. I think OpenBSD is well adapted to a specific kind of user and a specific kind of problems. If you're paranoid, or a developer, or just like the terminal window, or prefer design consistency over broad compatibility and feature variety, you might find that you really enjoy using OpenBSD. By all means, give it a spin if for no other reason than to learn about a thing that's out there that a bunch of people enjoy. If OpenBSD is not for you, that's okay too. I don't think that the user base, developers, or community have ever been looking run campaigns aimed at growing the popularity of the system. For me that's a good thing, the developers seem less prone to chasing the next thing that will expand their share in a market, and are more focused on making a thing they want to use - which translates well for me. YMMV.