4 ms·

It really is. I just reviewed it: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_open

It really is. I just reviewed it: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of... It worked, but a lot of stuff was way harder than it should be.

ruthmarx 2y ago
> It worked, but a lot of stuff was way harder than it should be. That's because the devs like it that way. They're comfortable with everything they learned 30 years ago and see no need for any of these newfangled usability improvements.
- lproven 2y ago
  Exactly, yes. And then they wonder why it's hard to attract new users to the community, and the maintainers are getting old and occasionally dying. See also: Emacs.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    There's something ironic about 'hackers' being so incredibly stuck in their ways.
lproven 2y ago
Here are some outstanding issues in the way. [1] Docs. Some of the issues I've faced with it could be fixed with better documentation. Baseline: you have an older computer, one you can afford to have non-working for a while. You want to be able to download drivers and stuff so you want to dual boot with another OS. What other OS doesn't really matter: could be Windows, could be Linux. Not important. Partitioning Document how to partition a disk while identifying what existing partition is which. How to ID a bootable working Windows partition, say, but remove the useless "recovery partition" and reuse that space. This needs covering for both BIOS/MBR and UEFI/GPT. Also: how to customise OpenBSD's positively Byzantine, labyrinthine partitioning so you have room to install GNOME or whatever. (Personally I detest GNOME and I'd say the only desktop in line with OpenBSD's goals of simplicity and cleanliness is Xfce, but whatever.) Bootloader Also: how to add the OpenBSD bootloader to GRUB. [2] Installer and partitioner. Many of the others... Well: while I was researching this article, I found a number of people posting on fora all around the Web going "the installation program is great" or words to that effect. The installation program is not great. It's a nightmare. [3] Virtualisation As it happened after installing 7.1 and 7.2 I was emboldened to get 7.5 running on bare metal, which was hard and I felt considerable pride that I did it, as one of 5 OSes on that machine. That happens to be around the time it stopped working in VirtualBox. Readers have commented to this effect, and I tried it and I've confirmed it. Out there in the real world people will try it first in a VM. It must work without any special config. It did work until around 7.3 or so and now it's broken. This is a major priority.
- sillywalk 2y ago
  > OpenBSD's positively Byzantine, labyrinthine partitioning I believe this stems from its BSD Disklabel roots. Disks are divided into 'slices' under BSD, which are called 'partitions' under non-BSD, either MS-DOS style or EFI. This 'slice'/partition is then sub-divided into different lettered "sub-partitions". And for historical reasons, the 'c' partition refers to .. I think the whole slice.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Nope. I suggest reading my article. HN will break my formatting here. https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of... OpenBSD created no fewer than nine separate partitions in its 32GB primary volume. The result is that it hasn't got the space to install, say, Xfce. ```` thinkpad-w500$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0a 986M 248M 688M 27% / /dev/wd0n 7.4G 227M 6.8G 4% /home /dev/wd0d 1.8G 5.8M 1.7G 1% /tmp /dev/wd0f 3.5G 1.5G 1.8G 45% /usr /dev/wd0g 986M 329M 608M 36% /usr/X11R6 /dev/wd0h 4.1G 924M 2.9G 24% /usr/local /dev/wd0m 5.7G 2.0K 5.4G 1% /usr/obj /dev/wd0l 1.8G 2.0K 1.7G 1% /usr/src /dev/wd0e 2.8G 10.4M 2.6G 1% /var ```` The real point here is that with such elaborate partitioning, this OS needs dynamic space management such as a logical volume manager. <sarcasm> But its developers are too old-school and want users to exercise their psychic powers and foresee their disk space needs in a few years and plan ahead. Sadly my clairvoyance is extremely weak. </sarcasm> IRL they think you're going to give a whole huge disk to the OS and the problem will go away. Same as the SUSE devs with Btrfs. It will fill its own disk with snapshots and because the FS design is broken, `df` does not work, so it can't tell and then it will self-destruct. Actually, in practice, this is bad design. It needs to be fixed. To be fixed, it needs to be called out publicly. That's what I am doing.

ruthmarx 2y ago

> It worked, but a lot of stuff was way harder than it should be. That's because the devs like it that way. They're comfortable with everything they learned 30 years ago and see no need for any of these newfangled usability improvements.

lproven 2y ago
Exactly, yes. And then they wonder why it's hard to attract new users to the community, and the maintainers are getting old and occasionally dying. See also: Emacs.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  There's something ironic about 'hackers' being so incredibly stuck in their ways.

lproven 2y ago

Here are some outstanding issues in the way. [1] Docs. Some of the issues I've faced with it could be fixed with better documentation. Baseline: you have an older computer, one you can afford to have non-working for a while. You want to be able to download drivers and stuff so you want to dual boot with another OS. What other OS doesn't really matter: could be Windows, could be Linux. Not important. Partitioning Document how to partition a disk while identifying what existing partition is which. How to ID a bootable working Windows partition, say, but remove the useless "recovery partition" and reuse that space. This needs covering for both BIOS/MBR and UEFI/GPT. Also: how to customise OpenBSD's positively Byzantine, labyrinthine partitioning so you have room to install GNOME or whatever. (Personally I detest GNOME and I'd say the only desktop in line with OpenBSD's goals of simplicity and cleanliness is Xfce, but whatever.) Bootloader Also: how to add the OpenBSD bootloader to GRUB. [2] Installer and partitioner. Many of the others... Well: while I was researching this article, I found a number of people posting on fora all around the Web going "the installation program is great" or words to that effect. The installation program is not great. It's a nightmare. [3] Virtualisation As it happened after installing 7.1 and 7.2 I was emboldened to get 7.5 running on bare metal, which was hard and I felt considerable pride that I did it, as one of 5 OSes on that machine. That happens to be around the time it stopped working in VirtualBox. Readers have commented to this effect, and I tried it and I've confirmed it. Out there in the real world people will try it first in a VM. It must work without any special config. It did work until around 7.3 or so and now it's broken. This is a major priority.

sillywalk 2y ago
> OpenBSD's positively Byzantine, labyrinthine partitioning I believe this stems from its BSD Disklabel roots. Disks are divided into 'slices' under BSD, which are called 'partitions' under non-BSD, either MS-DOS style or EFI. This 'slice'/partition is then sub-divided into different lettered "sub-partitions". And for historical reasons, the 'c' partition refers to .. I think the whole slice.
- lproven 2y ago
  Nope. I suggest reading my article. HN will break my formatting here. https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of... OpenBSD created no fewer than nine separate partitions in its 32GB primary volume. The result is that it hasn't got the space to install, say, Xfce. ```` thinkpad-w500$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0a 986M 248M 688M 27% / /dev/wd0n 7.4G 227M 6.8G 4% /home /dev/wd0d 1.8G 5.8M 1.7G 1% /tmp /dev/wd0f 3.5G 1.5G 1.8G 45% /usr /dev/wd0g 986M 329M 608M 36% /usr/X11R6 /dev/wd0h 4.1G 924M 2.9G 24% /usr/local /dev/wd0m 5.7G 2.0K 5.4G 1% /usr/obj /dev/wd0l 1.8G 2.0K 1.7G 1% /usr/src /dev/wd0e 2.8G 10.4M 2.6G 1% /var ```` The real point here is that with such elaborate partitioning, this OS needs dynamic space management such as a logical volume manager. <sarcasm> But its developers are too old-school and want users to exercise their psychic powers and foresee their disk space needs in a few years and plan ahead. Sadly my clairvoyance is extremely weak. </sarcasm> IRL they think you're going to give a whole huge disk to the OS and the problem will go away. Same as the SUSE devs with Btrfs. It will fill its own disk with snapshots and because the FS design is broken, `df` does not work, so it can't tell and then it will self-destruct. Actually, in practice, this is bad design. It needs to be fixed. To be fixed, it needs to be called out publicly. That's what I am doing.