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OpenBSD is a cozy operating system
- skilled 3y ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 3y agoThis mentions the docs. I don’t know what it is about the BSDs that attracts people fanatical about writing approachable and comprehensive documentation. It’s hard describe how good it is to someone who hasn’t experienced them, like explaining “blue” to someone who’s never been outside.
- yazzku 3y agoI'm more of a FreeBSD folk and occasional contributor to the handbook. Installing an OS you've never used just by following the goddamn manual surely is a refreshing experience.
- linguae 3y agoI think this has to do with the BSD’s origins as extensions to AT&T Unix. AT&T Unix shipped with excellent documentation beyond man pages. In fact, some of this documentation was included with FreeBSD, alongside documentation written by key Berkeley people such as Marshall Kirk McKusick. (I don’t know if FreeBSD still ships with this original Unix documentation due to its age. I remember reading a lot of this nearly 20 years ago as a high school student during the days of FreeBSD 5): https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/44doc/ https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/44doc/
- detourdog 3y agoThis is what make OpenBSD great. The software does what the documentation describes and there is only one source of documentation. The same seems to be tru for nuttx which I just stred exploring.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoELI5 why the “xz drama” couldn’t happen on openBSD? do they not use open source packages? are they assuming they would have caught it before adding the infected version to their repos?
- ddavis 3y agoThe back door relied on a couple of Linux package management systems (if I’m recalling correctly, it had .deb and .rpm checks, see https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=171227941117852&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=171227941117852&w=2)
- rrix2 3y agowas it mostly about the targets the xz actor was interested in than some security property inherent to openbsd that would prevent that sort of dynamic linking vulnerability?
- calgarymicro 3y agoDebian and RedHat link liblzma into SSH for systemd which OpenBSD doesn't use. So in the sense of there being a larger attack surface with those distros I guess you can consider it more secure, but it's not just OpenBSD though; there are plenty of Linux distros that don't do this either.
- shrubble 3y agoIf you run the 'ldd' tool against OpenBSD's ssh, you get 4 libraries. If you do the same on different Linux distros you get many more; this means the surface area is much larger.
- t-3 3y agoOpenSSH and the OpenBSD init system are part of the base system, maintained by OpenBSD developers. There's no opportunity for an outsider to use dependencies to insert backdoors in critical components.
- 3y ago
- subjectsigma 3y ago> All the core systems just work out the box. Yes, you need to "patch" in WiFi with a firmware update, ... ... did someone change the meaning of "out of the box" or "core systems" while I wasn't looking?
- AHTERIX5000 3y agoI guess WPA3 and bluetooth are not "core systems" either.
- toast0 3y agoIMHO, bluetooth is definitely not a core system for a desktop/laptop. Experience has taught me the bluetooth rune is an ancient symbol that means probably might work. There's no reason I would purchase a bluetooth perhipheral when a wired equivalent is available. For a mobile phone, it's probably a core system; connecting to a car radio is an important use case. If wired android auto/car play includes hands free calling over usb, then that could be enough, and maybe bluetooth can be relegated to my history bin; but a lot of people like wireless earbuds. As for WPA3, I dunno? Afaik, I've never needed that either, but my wifi is a bit old.
- Cyberdog 3y agoFor people wanting to use BSD in desktop systems, they arguably are. For those like me who primarily use it in servers, they’re not.
- wkat4242 3y agoGood point. I use FreeBSD on a daily driver NUC and I have no need for neither WiFi not Bluetooth. But I know I'm an outlier. Support on that front could definitely use some improvement. I had to turn off Bluetooth in the bios because it made my box hang on startup. Never bothered to find out why because I don't need it anyway.
- eternityforest 3y agoBSD seems really nice for its target audience. The people know what they want and the OS respects that. With Linux there's a bunch of people who seem to want Linux to be more like BSD, while the rest want it to be more like Windows/Android, so there's a lot more bickering.
- cherryteastain 3y agoFortunately, you can install Gentoo/Void if you're in the former camp or Ubuntu if you're in the latter camp.
- ninjin 3y agoI have not used Void Linux, so I can not comment. However, I do not think that source distributions like Gentoo, NixOS, etc. are a good comparison to what you get with the BSDs. BSDs (especially OpenBSD) tend to be about sane defaults and shipping rather complete systems, while the source-based Linux counterparts are more about endless configurability and how to tame it. Not arguing that one is better than the other (especially as I have used both Gentoo and NixOS), but it is certainly a very different take on what a *NIX system should be compared to the BSDs.
- bitwize 3y agoVoid Linux is, to a first approximation, "Arch without the BS". Because it ships a musl version, and because Lennart thinks anything but Linux/glibc is a niche corner case which can simply be ignored, Void does not use systemd but rather runit. (Indeed, it's the only distro I know of to officially switch away from systemd to something else.) Also, there are few, if any, distro-breaking flag days. I once blindly typed 'xbps-install -Syu' into a Raspberry Pi 2 that had fallen 2-3 years behind, and everything just chugged along and updated without a hitch. Source: I use Void, btw.
- rvense 3y agoFWIW I recently reverted to Arch after five years because Void broke itself completely, but it was otherwise a decent OS.
- frankjr 3y ago> Incredibly secure operating system (No xz drama here...) What makes OpenBSD incredibly secure?
- buescher 3y agoTheir development process. Like safety, security is the result of process, not a feature.
- marvinborner 3y agoRelevant article: https://isopenbsdsecu.re/about/ https://isopenbsdsecu.re/about/ I don't have a strong opinion about it myself, but the security aspect of OpenBSD is not as obvious as some people make it out to be.
- zshrc 3y agoSo I can only give a recent example of pinsyscalls(2), which associate a system call to a specific memory address to prevent return-to-libc attacks. It's subtle system/OS stuff that make it secure. You throw that out the window installing third party apps though... OpenBSD is best served pure if security is your main angle.
- wolverine876 3y agoThe purpose of that website is to take down OpenBSD's reputation for security.
- logicprog 3y agoWell obviously. The question is, are they wrong to do so?
- whiterknight 3y agoActually their stated reason for making the site is that they don’t like the politics of openbsd devs > Because the OpenBSD community is notorious for not being nice and welcoming:
- mise_en_place 3y agoIt’s cozy until you need to use their version of clang. Even macos bootstraps pkgsrc better than OpenBSD. In this sense MacOS is more BSD than OpenBSD.
- littleq0903 3y agothis webpage is powered by FreeBSD according to the footer
- nanolith 3y agoI like the aesthetic of BSDs in general, and what is nice about OpenBSD in particular is that it is opinionated, but the opinions are mostly on point. Documentation is comprehensive, and configuration can be completely derived by reading man pages. The defaults are reasonable, and the documentation is useful for tweaking things. Both pledge and unveil have made certain third party applications like Chrome significantly safer. The OS is small and performs well on older hardware. I use it on my "throw away" travel laptop with full disk encryption backed by a USB key that I keep separate from the laptop when it is not in my immediate possession. I also ported my personal website to OpenBSD. I use a variation of BCHS (https://learnbchs.org/ https://learnbchs.org/) for dynamic content. I've tweaked this framework to use serialization barriers and LMDB instead of SQLite. I can use both pledge and unveil along with some DJB style application decomposition to get reasonable defense in depth while keeping the code easy enough for a newbie to understand. Is it better than operating system X? Probably not, but really, that's not the point. It's small, well put together, well documented, and safe enough. I run FreeBSD on my development server, mainly so I can take advantage of ZFS and better virtualization support. But, many of the virtual machines I run on my dev server are OpenBSD based.
- ninjin 3y agoThank you for writing this. I always find it very hard to put into words what it is that makes OpenBSD "click" for me, but what you write here is about as close of a description as I have yet to find. The whole package and process just subjectively feels "right" for me (note the emphasis). Yes, I am probably better off in terms of productivity elsewhere. But that is not what it is about to me. At home, where I am in control, I just want things to feel "right" and that is somehow what OpenBSD does for me.
- 1oooqooq 3y agobut then you're stuck with Xorg... and slower vms... only disadvantages I can think of honestly
- nanolith 3y agoNeither bothers me. Both work just fine on older hardware. I don't need cutting edge performance.
- somat 3y agoI agree, I use obsd as a desktop system. and objectively it is worse than a linux system. yet, there is something about it, A thing that I find difficult to put into words, where I dread those times when I boot into another os and am happy to get back to my comfortable obsd system. Now a large part of this is familiarity and I like to delude myself that it is because I feel that I understand obsd is a way that would be very difficult on any other OS. But I don't like free or netbsd nearly as much. So because I am unable to describe what I like about it I would suggest people try it, if you like it, that is great, but if you bounce off, which is understandable there are an awful lot of limitations using obsd on the desktop, don't force yourself to use it.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoIf it ever gets a modern file system I could probably use it for a daily driver. But powercuts are just a fact of life here.
- ivanjermakov 3y agoDoes it really matter which unix OS to use? For me it boils down to the package manager. Arch and NixOS come up as the best options: https://repology.org/repositories/graphs https://repology.org/repositories/graphs
- Touche 3y agoYes, there's a huge difference between Linux and BSDs.
- ksec 3y agoI wonder what's the performance delta like with latest OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The gap used to huge. Have we reached the point where we could ignore that performance cost and adopt OpenBSD for majority of appliance and applications.
- alberth 3y agoI imagine it remains significant, and will always be so. OpenBSD prioritizes simplicity over almost all else. And modern OS’es do complex work to fully utilize all cores. This complexity is something OpenBSD has yet to adopt. Ironically, DragonflyBSD forked from FreeBSD over wanting to go down an innovative (and simpler) approach to SMP … and while it took it awhile to get there, its performance is on par or better than all the BSD, including FreeBSD. (With the smallest of all dev teams of the BSDs too)
- j-pb 3y agoUnix in general is a very cozy tent with a lifetime supply of canned beans, set up in bear territory. Ok for a while but I wish we had build a house by now.
- wkat4242 3y agoHm? My KDE Plasma setup on FreeBSD definitely feels like a house to me :) And it's really my house, not Microsoft's, Apple's or even Canonical's or RedHat's.
- whereistimbo 3y agoOpenBSD is also make a nice router too. With its minimalist design combined with secure by default system. https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://filebin.net/avx52e2zeeq33j97/p_pic.zip https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://filebin....
- mrbluecoat 3y agoWhy the link to a zip file? Also, OpenBSD support for WiFi is generally considered less robust than Linux. For example, no 802.11ax support as of this post: https://www.openbsdhandbook.com/networking/wireless/#supported-chipsets https://www.openbsdhandbook.com/networking/wireless/#support...