3 ms·

This isn't really the right place to launch into a full diatribe on this, but for anyone who isn't familiar and may be confused by this claim, I want to point o

This isn't really the right place to launch into a full diatribe on this, but for anyone who isn't familiar and may be confused by this claim, I want to point out this specifically refers to the default install with no extra services running. I love BSD based OSes, but I've always found this claim to be a little irritating, because it's far less impressive IMO than it sounds to the uninitiated. It's impressive from the perspective of Windows or Solaris which enable huge numbers of network daemons by default and have both suffered numerous high profile remote vulnerabilities on default installs, but OpenBSD isn't really much different from most Linux distros on this. I'm sure most distros have had more remote vulnerabilities, but not that many. Your average Joe out-of-the-box install of Fedora or Ubuntu doesn't really have any open services IIRC, so an exploit would need to directly target the Linux IP stack, or one of the network autoconfig services if that's in scope.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
This is all correct, but in my not so humble opinion all the BSDs profit from having a more compact and cohesive base, which leads to less cognitive load for the sysadmin. Which you can learn and understand without having to resort to searching crack overflow, or whatever else, if you're so inclined. Which in turn can lead to a better understanding of the 'big picture', and the additional services running atop of it, no matter if they are coming from the base, or have been added afterwards. Not necessarily, but it eases the path to that sort of mindset. I don't see that in any mainstream Linux distribution. There are alternatives, but then you're more or less on your own, necessitating work which could be avoided if some BSD satisfies your needs regarding hardware driver support. At the end of the day it amounts to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar I'm a grumpy old fart and (usually) don't like chaos.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  A minimal Debian installation (which is easiest to do from the netinstall image, although it can be done from any other by selecting the appropriate option in the installation menu: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/615465 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/615465) gets you the most slimmed down system possible without going to something like Alpine. There's nothing to remove there if you want your system to boot at all. No idea why it's not more popular tbh (I setup most systems this way both for security and efficiency reasons). The default installation profiles for most distributions are incredibly bloated in comparison (especially Ubuntu and such).
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    Dude, I know that screen, I also did the textmode equivalents ;-) Nevertheless any Debian or derivative feels bizarre to me. Yes, I know apt-pinning, custom repos and whatnot. I'm writing this on a derivative booted into 'ramdisk' and running from there for 139 days now. (Oh my Gawd! How dare I?!) Because the good folks from AntiX and MX-Linux made it possible, and did the work for me. Making intelligent use of the facilities Linux can offer. apt-shred dist chainsaw!
- spijdar 4y ago
  I really desperately want to agree with this at an emotional or aesthetic level - I ran NetBSD on my laptop for the largest portion of my teenage years, using FreeBSD on an old poweredge server for all my "needs a ton of RAM" programs. I had been on this quest to "truly understand" computers/OSes since prepubescence, and BSD appealed to me for exactly the reasons you describe - the pieces just seemed to fit together better. I've gone deep down this rabbit hole, but now in my mid 20s, it seems like it's all sentimental - the amount of time I interact with any base system is pretty low, Linux's device model seems better suited to modern systems than BSD's more static kernel configs inherited from PDP-11/VAX/VMEbus-esque systems, and probably more than anything else, it's almost always easier to get your software to run on Linux. And after thinking about it, isn't that really the purpose of an OS? To facilitate running and developing software? I still love running NetBSD on my 90s SPARC laptop, with device drivers descendant from the original 4.4BSD from UCB. I've gone so far as to patch my local install to get the crappy mu-law audio output working so I could playback youtube videos on it for kicks and giggles (recent releases overhauled the audio driver backend and the AMD7930's driver doesn't release some mutexes, failing asserts and hard faults the kernel) Sometimes the Cathedral isn't so nice though. I never really figured out where I could send the ~5 line patch for this, only where I could submit a bug report, and possibly start a dialogue on the mailing list where I could maybe suggest the fix, and then a NetBSD developer could go fix it themselves? Didn't think it was worth the effort, so I never patched it. Meanwhile, on Linux, I got a one line patch into the kernel, fixing a presumption that all 32-bit processes are big endian on PowerPC, thereby allowing the development of a 32-bit LE userland. Almost certainly useless to anyone, but it was a bug fix, and the patch process was fairly painless. I think the end result is that Linux is fast and messy and a little ugly, but most of my hardware and software is also ugly and messy. I could run BSD on my laptop nowadays, but the only day-to-day change to my display server running firefox and $TERM windows would be a hotter keyboard and a few cents added to my energy bill, since those kernels don't really vibe with Intel p-states or whatever it's called now. My userland environment and day to day life is basically identical, just a few added problems when some piece of software assumes I'm on Linux and breaks. Well, that and OOM handling. I don't ever remember the BSDs locking up quite like Linux does when it runs out of memory (or thrashes swap). This turned out more rambly than I intended, but oh well. While I'm ranting, why is OpenBSD's fdisk the only implementation of fdisk with a command mode where quitting automatically saves changes*, as opposed to util-linux's fdisk, and NetBSD/FreeBSD's fdisk which always prompt? :-)
tedunangst 4y ago
One might well ask why a default redhat install doesn't have a dozen services running and when did that become the standard?
- noAnswer 4y ago
  It became the standard _because_ of OpenBSD! They mocked others for decades. People forget that! I remember SuSE 6 from me youth. It run of the box (having selected a Desktop-Setup) SSH, Telnet, Apache, FTP, Finger, Samba, CUPS and probably other daemons I forgot! You dail-in to the internet and bam: everthing/most was accessible via a public IP. I used to "pwn" boxes with exploits from packetstorm myself. (Ironically OpenBSD was late to the "easy update"-party. You used to need to patch and compile updates yourself.)

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

This is all correct, but in my not so humble opinion all the BSDs profit from having a more compact and cohesive base, which leads to less cognitive load for the sysadmin. Which you can learn and understand without having to resort to searching crack overflow, or whatever else, if you're so inclined. Which in turn can lead to a better understanding of the 'big picture', and the additional services running atop of it, no matter if they are coming from the base, or have been added afterwards. Not necessarily, but it eases the path to that sort of mindset. I don't see that in any mainstream Linux distribution. There are alternatives, but then you're more or less on your own, necessitating work which could be avoided if some BSD satisfies your needs regarding hardware driver support. At the end of the day it amounts to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar I'm a grumpy old fart and (usually) don't like chaos.

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
A minimal Debian installation (which is easiest to do from the netinstall image, although it can be done from any other by selecting the appropriate option in the installation menu: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/615465 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/615465) gets you the most slimmed down system possible without going to something like Alpine. There's nothing to remove there if you want your system to boot at all. No idea why it's not more popular tbh (I setup most systems this way both for security and efficiency reasons). The default installation profiles for most distributions are incredibly bloated in comparison (especially Ubuntu and such).
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  Dude, I know that screen, I also did the textmode equivalents ;-) Nevertheless any Debian or derivative feels bizarre to me. Yes, I know apt-pinning, custom repos and whatnot. I'm writing this on a derivative booted into 'ramdisk' and running from there for 139 days now. (Oh my Gawd! How dare I?!) Because the good folks from AntiX and MX-Linux made it possible, and did the work for me. Making intelligent use of the facilities Linux can offer. apt-shred dist chainsaw!
spijdar 4y ago
I really desperately want to agree with this at an emotional or aesthetic level - I ran NetBSD on my laptop for the largest portion of my teenage years, using FreeBSD on an old poweredge server for all my "needs a ton of RAM" programs. I had been on this quest to "truly understand" computers/OSes since prepubescence, and BSD appealed to me for exactly the reasons you describe - the pieces just seemed to fit together better. I've gone deep down this rabbit hole, but now in my mid 20s, it seems like it's all sentimental - the amount of time I interact with any base system is pretty low, Linux's device model seems better suited to modern systems than BSD's more static kernel configs inherited from PDP-11/VAX/VMEbus-esque systems, and probably more than anything else, it's almost always easier to get your software to run on Linux. And after thinking about it, isn't that really the purpose of an OS? To facilitate running and developing software? I still love running NetBSD on my 90s SPARC laptop, with device drivers descendant from the original 4.4BSD from UCB. I've gone so far as to patch my local install to get the crappy mu-law audio output working so I could playback youtube videos on it for kicks and giggles (recent releases overhauled the audio driver backend and the AMD7930's driver doesn't release some mutexes, failing asserts and hard faults the kernel) Sometimes the Cathedral isn't so nice though. I never really figured out where I could send the ~5 line patch for this, only where I could submit a bug report, and possibly start a dialogue on the mailing list where I could maybe suggest the fix, and then a NetBSD developer could go fix it themselves? Didn't think it was worth the effort, so I never patched it. Meanwhile, on Linux, I got a one line patch into the kernel, fixing a presumption that all 32-bit processes are big endian on PowerPC, thereby allowing the development of a 32-bit LE userland. Almost certainly useless to anyone, but it was a bug fix, and the patch process was fairly painless. I think the end result is that Linux is fast and messy and a little ugly, but most of my hardware and software is also ugly and messy. I could run BSD on my laptop nowadays, but the only day-to-day change to my display server running firefox and $TERM windows would be a hotter keyboard and a few cents added to my energy bill, since those kernels don't really vibe with Intel p-states or whatever it's called now. My userland environment and day to day life is basically identical, just a few added problems when some piece of software assumes I'm on Linux and breaks. Well, that and OOM handling. I don't ever remember the BSDs locking up quite like Linux does when it runs out of memory (or thrashes swap). This turned out more rambly than I intended, but oh well. While I'm ranting, why is OpenBSD's fdisk the only implementation of fdisk with a command mode where quitting automatically saves changes*, as opposed to util-linux's fdisk, and NetBSD/FreeBSD's fdisk which always prompt? :-)

tedunangst 4y ago

One might well ask why a default redhat install doesn't have a dozen services running and when did that become the standard?

noAnswer 4y ago
It became the standard _because_ of OpenBSD! They mocked others for decades. People forget that! I remember SuSE 6 from me youth. It run of the box (having selected a Desktop-Setup) SSH, Telnet, Apache, FTP, Finger, Samba, CUPS and probably other daemons I forgot! You dail-in to the internet and bam: everthing/most was accessible via a public IP. I used to "pwn" boxes with exploits from packetstorm myself. (Ironically OpenBSD was late to the "easy update"-party. You used to need to patch and compile updates yourself.)