7 ms·

OpenBSD for Linux Users

105 points by nazgulsenpai 4y ago

unixhero 4y ago
If only I had a use case. I boot it up on exotic and obsolete architectures, as they still do builds for eg. PPC64 (Apple Mac G5). The white framebuffer is kind of beautiful.
- ianai 4y ago
  It’d probably help if it had a company like Red Hat offering enterprise support and contributing back to it. Knowledge certification helps a ton too. It’s all fun and games until the SME leaves and a company finds out how hard it is to hire another person with skills in that OS.
  - toyg 4y ago
    It'd probably help also if they could find a killer-app role. Currently it's a decent OS only for low-level devices like routers and firewalls, which are a fairly small part of the computing ecosystem (and even there, it has lost a lot of ground to OSes that exploit multithreading better, hence giving faster throughput). As an application-development platform there are roadblocks at every turn and no real use-case. The community is even hostile to not-C developers. It's a shame, because the simplicity and security are great.
    - cylinder714 4y ago
      >a decent OS only for low-level devices Why do people insist on smearing OpenBSD like this? My 2011 ThinkPads run Firefox and LibreOffice just fine. It's not as polished as Fedora, sure, but I never have to reinstall after upgrading trashes grub, which happened to me earlier this year.
      - toyg 4y ago
        It's not a smear, it's a realistic assessment of its market position. And I say that as someone who likes it.
      - nix23 4y ago
        >Why do people insist on smearing OpenBSD like this? Because they never used it on a Desktop for a extended time, however i use FreeBSD and can play any Game Linux can...thanks to Proton. Fedora polished? Ever seen those SELinux problems after updates?
  - nix23 4y ago
    If a admin comes to me and tells me he understands Linux but is not capable of learning any BSD...kick in the butt and goodbye. Don't search for Linux-Admins but real ones..the one's who are also capable to maintain Windows, and if they have no clue they start to learn.
    - ianai 4y ago
      As that guy where I work, agreed.
- lizknope 4y ago
  I miss seeing Sun SPARCstations boot. The Sun logo and the black text on white screen was always cool to me. https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparcboot.jpg https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparcboot.jpg
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    That link doesn't work for me, it looks like they prevent hot linking images
    - volkadav 4y ago
      For what it's worth, appears to be from this page: https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparc.htm https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparc.htm Agreed that the old Sun hardware was pretty classy. :) They went through a number of different boot logos: https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos (I think my favorite was the CG6 framebuffer one, though I'm probably dating myself quite a bit with that opinion, haha).
smitty1e 4y ago
For those that truly cannot abide systemd, OpenBSD seems a great alternative.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  But for those who want Linux, there’s always Slackware - the most BSD-like distribution out there.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    Hey, I remember Slackware! It's great for hypervisors. UnRAID uses it.
  - nix23 4y ago
    > the most BSD-like distribution out there. I would say it's Crux Linux, the spiritual father of Arch.
- cylinder714 4y ago
  ungleich, a hosting company in Switzerland, is a big supporter of Devuan, a systemd-free fork of Debian: https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2017/12/10/the-importance-of-devuan/ https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2017/12/10/the-importance...
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    while article is bit old ( 2017 ) at least that guy talks about money and cost of support/fixing things. Interesting reading, thanks!
- deadbunny 4y ago
  Hopefully if they all move over to BSD they'll stop posting 10 year old arguments and FUD in any thread that has the audacity to even mention systemd.
- rahen 4y ago
  But so do Alpine, Devuan, Guix, Slackware or Void.
LoganDark 4y ago
It looks like this page isn't quite finished yet, but it looks promising! I may want to try OpenBSD one of these days. I have at least one friend who loves it and constantly tells me about how cool it is compared to Linux.
- flatiron 4y ago
  It’s great for specific applications but you would be hard pressed to say it’s a better desktop OS than a gnu Linux distro. Bluetooth is a pretty hard thing to miss.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    I don't use Bluetooth. I even use my DualSense controller wired. A true UNIX is hard to beat. I grew up with macOS and was devastated when my Mac broke & couldn't afford a new one. Been despising Windows for the past ~1.5 years. OpenBSD is nothing like macOS, but it is still UNIX.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      Did you consider Linux? While it isn't Unix certified, it's still Unix-like, and is quite usable as a desktop (YMMV of course).
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        I did. I've used Ubuntu, Arch, Alpine and also KISS Linux. I think KISS Linux is my favorite in terms of control, but it gives me so much control that I was never able to get it working. Its build system is theoretically awesome, but in practice maintaining my own distribution is less fun than it sounds. Alpine is my favorite in terms of runtime stability since it essentially reimages itself into a tmpfs every boot and packages are completely atomic. But the fact that everything is statically linked means it's a pain to get anything working, and I haven't yet found anything that fills both niches. (I have not tried Silverblue or NixOS yet) Arch is my favorite in terms of customization because basically everything has an AUR package these days, including the old traditional window managers (i.e. blackbox) that make for a utilitarian UNIX, my favorite kind. (With Wayland that all goes away, which is why I despise Wayland.) Ubuntu is far too "stable" for my needs, and I commonly find that the newest release is already years out of date on packages. You basically need Linuxbrew to do any sort of bleeding-edge development on an Ubuntu machine. I'm open to trying more, of course.
brynet 4y ago
The vast majority of this sites content is copied directly from other sources, such as the official OpenBSD FAQ[0], without credit. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ https://www.openbsd.org/faq/
extendedrm 4y ago
This website uses a misleading domain name and has nothing to do with OpenBSD officially. There is no "OpenBSD handbook" (although the FAQ is basically that). It's run by a Danish guy who goes by the username "iio7". He also runs unixsheikh.com, which seems to have quite a negative reputation on HN. A lot of the content on this site was directly copied from official OpenBSD pages with very minor rewordings.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >It's run by a Danish guy who goes by the username "iio7". Where you found this? The page lacks any author or contact info.
fsckwtfsck 4y ago
Hopefully it covers the weird questions about inodes and links the kernel asks you when doing a dirty reboot after a crash (OpenBSD does not have a journaling file system, so you better get ready for those questions asking if inode 1823791277 in /var does this or that, or perhaps just press 'y' repeatedly and pray). It's perhaps a positive point if you're a boomer and miss the excitement of 1980s UNIX.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Koshkin 4y ago
  How frequent are crashes though? I would think, more often the user could just accidentally pull the power plug without a proper shutdown.
the-printer 4y ago
As a newcomer to OpenBSD myself, I strongly advise anyone to ignore any online resources that are not the official FAQ or at the least https://romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/ https://romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/ for clear and concise guides on how to do specific tasks that a user may be interested in. I’ve found that most “I installed OpenBSD on X hardware” blog posts are good mainly for seeing how the installation process fared (what should I disable in BIOS?; what hardware works, what doesn’t?) or what their subsequent configuration process was like after installation.
ainar-g 4y ago
One command that I've used a lot that's missing is: pkg_info -Q str It allows searching for packages with substring str in their name. Very useful when you want to see, which additional packages are available for a thing, for examlpe: pkg_info -Q xfce
dimensionc132 4y ago
suprjami 4y ago
That's the weirdest network setup I've ever seen. Everything seems so spread out and inconsistent. I wonder how this set of names and paths came about?

105 points by nazgulsenpai 4y ago

If only I had a use case. I boot it up on exotic and obsolete architectures, as they still do builds for eg. PPC64 (Apple Mac G5). The white framebuffer is kind of beautiful.

ianai 4y ago
It’d probably help if it had a company like Red Hat offering enterprise support and contributing back to it. Knowledge certification helps a ton too. It’s all fun and games until the SME leaves and a company finds out how hard it is to hire another person with skills in that OS.
- toyg 4y ago
  It'd probably help also if they could find a killer-app role. Currently it's a decent OS only for low-level devices like routers and firewalls, which are a fairly small part of the computing ecosystem (and even there, it has lost a lot of ground to OSes that exploit multithreading better, hence giving faster throughput). As an application-development platform there are roadblocks at every turn and no real use-case. The community is even hostile to not-C developers. It's a shame, because the simplicity and security are great.
  - cylinder714 4y ago
    >a decent OS only for low-level devices Why do people insist on smearing OpenBSD like this? My 2011 ThinkPads run Firefox and LibreOffice just fine. It's not as polished as Fedora, sure, but I never have to reinstall after upgrading trashes grub, which happened to me earlier this year.
    - toyg 4y ago
      It's not a smear, it's a realistic assessment of its market position. And I say that as someone who likes it.
    - nix23 4y ago
      >Why do people insist on smearing OpenBSD like this? Because they never used it on a Desktop for a extended time, however i use FreeBSD and can play any Game Linux can...thanks to Proton. Fedora polished? Ever seen those SELinux problems after updates?
- nix23 4y ago
  If a admin comes to me and tells me he understands Linux but is not capable of learning any BSD...kick in the butt and goodbye. Don't search for Linux-Admins but real ones..the one's who are also capable to maintain Windows, and if they have no clue they start to learn.
  - ianai 4y ago
    As that guy where I work, agreed.
lizknope 4y ago
I miss seeing Sun SPARCstations boot. The Sun logo and the black text on white screen was always cool to me. https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparcboot.jpg https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparcboot.jpg
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  That link doesn't work for me, it looks like they prevent hot linking images
  - volkadav 4y ago
    For what it's worth, appears to be from this page: https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparc.htm https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/sparc.htm Agreed that the old Sun hardware was pretty classy. :) They went through a number of different boot logos: https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos (I think my favorite was the CG6 framebuffer one, though I'm probably dating myself quite a bit with that opinion, haha).

smitty1e 4y ago

For those that truly cannot abide systemd, OpenBSD seems a great alternative.

Koshkin 4y ago
But for those who want Linux, there’s always Slackware - the most BSD-like distribution out there.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  Hey, I remember Slackware! It's great for hypervisors. UnRAID uses it.
- nix23 4y ago
  > the most BSD-like distribution out there. I would say it's Crux Linux, the spiritual father of Arch.
cylinder714 4y ago
ungleich, a hosting company in Switzerland, is a big supporter of Devuan, a systemd-free fork of Debian: https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2017/12/10/the-importance-of-devuan/ https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2017/12/10/the-importance...
- CoolCold 4y ago
  while article is bit old ( 2017 ) at least that guy talks about money and cost of support/fixing things. Interesting reading, thanks!
deadbunny 4y ago
Hopefully if they all move over to BSD they'll stop posting 10 year old arguments and FUD in any thread that has the audacity to even mention systemd.
rahen 4y ago
But so do Alpine, Devuan, Guix, Slackware or Void.

LoganDark 4y ago

It looks like this page isn't quite finished yet, but it looks promising! I may want to try OpenBSD one of these days. I have at least one friend who loves it and constantly tells me about how cool it is compared to Linux.

flatiron 4y ago
It’s great for specific applications but you would be hard pressed to say it’s a better desktop OS than a gnu Linux distro. Bluetooth is a pretty hard thing to miss.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  I don't use Bluetooth. I even use my DualSense controller wired. A true UNIX is hard to beat. I grew up with macOS and was devastated when my Mac broke & couldn't afford a new one. Been despising Windows for the past ~1.5 years. OpenBSD is nothing like macOS, but it is still UNIX.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    Did you consider Linux? While it isn't Unix certified, it's still Unix-like, and is quite usable as a desktop (YMMV of course).
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      I did. I've used Ubuntu, Arch, Alpine and also KISS Linux. I think KISS Linux is my favorite in terms of control, but it gives me so much control that I was never able to get it working. Its build system is theoretically awesome, but in practice maintaining my own distribution is less fun than it sounds. Alpine is my favorite in terms of runtime stability since it essentially reimages itself into a tmpfs every boot and packages are completely atomic. But the fact that everything is statically linked means it's a pain to get anything working, and I haven't yet found anything that fills both niches. (I have not tried Silverblue or NixOS yet) Arch is my favorite in terms of customization because basically everything has an AUR package these days, including the old traditional window managers (i.e. blackbox) that make for a utilitarian UNIX, my favorite kind. (With Wayland that all goes away, which is why I despise Wayland.) Ubuntu is far too "stable" for my needs, and I commonly find that the newest release is already years out of date on packages. You basically need Linuxbrew to do any sort of bleeding-edge development on an Ubuntu machine. I'm open to trying more, of course.

brynet 4y ago

The vast majority of this sites content is copied directly from other sources, such as the official OpenBSD FAQ[0], without credit. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ https://www.openbsd.org/faq/

extendedrm 4y ago

This website uses a misleading domain name and has nothing to do with OpenBSD officially. There is no "OpenBSD handbook" (although the FAQ is basically that). It's run by a Danish guy who goes by the username "iio7". He also runs unixsheikh.com, which seems to have quite a negative reputation on HN. A lot of the content on this site was directly copied from official OpenBSD pages with very minor rewordings.

forgotpwd16 4y ago
>It's run by a Danish guy who goes by the username "iio7". Where you found this? The page lacks any author or contact info.

fsckwtfsck 4y ago

Hopefully it covers the weird questions about inodes and links the kernel asks you when doing a dirty reboot after a crash (OpenBSD does not have a journaling file system, so you better get ready for those questions asking if inode 1823791277 in /var does this or that, or perhaps just press 'y' repeatedly and pray). It's perhaps a positive point if you're a boomer and miss the excitement of 1980s UNIX.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Koshkin 4y ago
How frequent are crashes though? I would think, more often the user could just accidentally pull the power plug without a proper shutdown.

the-printer 4y ago

As a newcomer to OpenBSD myself, I strongly advise anyone to ignore any online resources that are not the official FAQ or at the least https://romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/ https://romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/ for clear and concise guides on how to do specific tasks that a user may be interested in. I’ve found that most “I installed OpenBSD on X hardware” blog posts are good mainly for seeing how the installation process fared (what should I disable in BIOS?; what hardware works, what doesn’t?) or what their subsequent configuration process was like after installation.

ainar-g 4y ago

One command that I've used a lot that's missing is: pkg_info -Q str It allows searching for packages with substring str in their name. Very useful when you want to see, which additional packages are available for a thing, for examlpe: pkg_info -Q xfce

dimensionc132 4y ago

suprjami 4y ago

That's the weirdest network setup I've ever seen. Everything seems so spread out and inconsistent. I wonder how this set of names and paths came about?