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Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version. Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over th

Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version. Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop market. Can OpenBSD continue to live only as a server / router / network service operating system for the long term? I don't know. And, even in the server market, it's falling behind in terms of support. The VPS market has gotten really big really quickly; the OpenBSD team has legitimate concerns about trying to run a "secure by default" operating system in a virtualized environment, but unfortunately that point of view has resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace, etc. I have no idea if OpenBSD's installed user base is growing or shrinking overall. But, I expect that it's rapidly shrinking relative to the amount of support that Linux is currently enjoying, and that's going to lead to OpenBSD getting less and less upstream support, which is eventually going to strangle the project. The small OpenBSD development team simply won't have the resources to rewrite all of the big upstream packages. (And I'm not talking about Gnome here; OpenBSD already has its own httpd and its own smtpd, for example.)

jeremyjh 14y ago
> Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop market. Please provide a source for this.
hazov 14y ago
The question is, like the parent post said, for networking OpenBSD is actually better in my experience. This has little to do with user base, a startup that I was working on had a firewall cluster made of OpenBSD systems using CARP and pfsync we tried using Linux and conntrack, since the admins are Linux guys, but the OpenBSD solution was more stable for us. In this regard I think OpenBSD worked better, for everything else, including workstations, Linux was well above anything that OpenBSD could offer.
agumonkey 14y ago
Desktop would be a waste of energy. Already too crowded of a market, and the single point of success would be hardware support.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Perhaps my comment was too long. 1. I posit that without desktop support, OpenBSD will continue to lose upstream support, including support for packages related to network services, 2. and that this might eventually kill OpenBSD, because they don't have the resources to continue reimplementing their own version of everything, as they have with e.g. httpd and smtpd, 3. and that OpenBSD already has nearly nonexistent support in a new, rapidly growing server market (VPS).
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    My bad, I thought this was a separate point.
ghshephard 14y ago
"Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version." How long will Cisco IOS continue to survive without a modern desktop version? Even our most die-hard OpenBSD "everywhere" fanatics (and we have a number of them) don't run it as their Desktop OS, and have never suggested you should. OpenBSD is a server/router/network service OS. OpenBSD has found it's sweet spot. It owns the market for stable, well defined, well documented, consistent, x86 Firewalls and secure servers. People need to realize that trying to shove OpenBSD onto the desktop is the ultimate case of square peg/round hole.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Fair point, but Cisco IOS is supported by a large company with deep pockets and a vested interest in its continued development. And, OpenBSD is far more complex than IOS; it has a much larger problem set to solve. Also, I'm not arguing that OpenBSD needs to compete as a desktop OS. I agree that that is not its niche. But I am arguing that without a desktop presence, upstream support for OpenBSD will continue to diminish, and at some point that is going to seriously harm the project. Today, it's Gnome; imagine if tomorrow the Samba team decided that future versions of smbd would require systemd, and justified their decision by saying, "Well, it's not like the BSDs have been active on our mailing list." What does OpenBSD do then? At what point does their niche become too small to sustain the project?
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    In 15 years of working in IT organizations at various companies I've seen hundreds of people run Solaris as their Desktop OS (mostly 1996-1998 at Netscape), various Macintosh System OS's and Irix as their desktop, at times everyone was running Linux as their Desktop OS, and nowadays OS X seems to be popular (obviously there has always been a lot of Windows Desktop Usage) I have never, once, seen OpenBSD run as a Desktop OS. This despite working at several companies where OpenBSD was actually core to our entire infrastructure. I'm not saying that nobody does (I expect the OpenBSD developers probably do), but I am strongly suggesting that OpenBSD needs no desktop presence whatsoever to be extraordinarily successful. I've never installed it on the desktop. I've never seen anybody install it on the desktop. Not once in 15 years. There is no rationale reason to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I'll go further and say I will likely never see X-Windows run on OpenBSD. And, as for a niche - I consider OpenBSD to be the pre-eminent platform for Firewalling, IPsec, IPv6. Their continual focus on consistency makes the system a joy to use - all of the lessons I learned in 2001/2002 are almost 100% (hell, they might be 100%) applicable to managing an OpenBSD system today. They may be a niche but it's a pretty darn big one. With regards to your argument regarding "upstream" support - most of the upstream support required is around elements that are not associated with the desktop, and, in many areas, openBSD has just decided to rewrite the upstream contribuions in their own "OpenBSDsh" way anyways. I'm confident they will do fine even if upstream support for desktop, and associated applications, no longer considers BSD as a first-rate platform.
olgeni 14y ago
> that point of view has resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace, etc. However, it will probably work just fine on a cloud platform based on KVM.

jeremyjh 14y ago

> Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop market. Please provide a source for this.

hazov 14y ago

The question is, like the parent post said, for networking OpenBSD is actually better in my experience. This has little to do with user base, a startup that I was working on had a firewall cluster made of OpenBSD systems using CARP and pfsync we tried using Linux and conntrack, since the admins are Linux guys, but the OpenBSD solution was more stable for us. In this regard I think OpenBSD worked better, for everything else, including workstations, Linux was well above anything that OpenBSD could offer.

agumonkey 14y ago

Desktop would be a waste of energy. Already too crowded of a market, and the single point of success would be hardware support.

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Perhaps my comment was too long. 1. I posit that without desktop support, OpenBSD will continue to lose upstream support, including support for packages related to network services, 2. and that this might eventually kill OpenBSD, because they don't have the resources to continue reimplementing their own version of everything, as they have with e.g. httpd and smtpd, 3. and that OpenBSD already has nearly nonexistent support in a new, rapidly growing server market (VPS).
- agumonkey 14y ago
  My bad, I thought this was a separate point.

ghshephard 14y ago

"Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version." How long will Cisco IOS continue to survive without a modern desktop version? Even our most die-hard OpenBSD "everywhere" fanatics (and we have a number of them) don't run it as their Desktop OS, and have never suggested you should. OpenBSD is a server/router/network service OS. OpenBSD has found it's sweet spot. It owns the market for stable, well defined, well documented, consistent, x86 Firewalls and secure servers. People need to realize that trying to shove OpenBSD onto the desktop is the ultimate case of square peg/round hole.

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Fair point, but Cisco IOS is supported by a large company with deep pockets and a vested interest in its continued development. And, OpenBSD is far more complex than IOS; it has a much larger problem set to solve. Also, I'm not arguing that OpenBSD needs to compete as a desktop OS. I agree that that is not its niche. But I am arguing that without a desktop presence, upstream support for OpenBSD will continue to diminish, and at some point that is going to seriously harm the project. Today, it's Gnome; imagine if tomorrow the Samba team decided that future versions of smbd would require systemd, and justified their decision by saying, "Well, it's not like the BSDs have been active on our mailing list." What does OpenBSD do then? At what point does their niche become too small to sustain the project?
- ghshephard 14y ago
  In 15 years of working in IT organizations at various companies I've seen hundreds of people run Solaris as their Desktop OS (mostly 1996-1998 at Netscape), various Macintosh System OS's and Irix as their desktop, at times everyone was running Linux as their Desktop OS, and nowadays OS X seems to be popular (obviously there has always been a lot of Windows Desktop Usage) I have never, once, seen OpenBSD run as a Desktop OS. This despite working at several companies where OpenBSD was actually core to our entire infrastructure. I'm not saying that nobody does (I expect the OpenBSD developers probably do), but I am strongly suggesting that OpenBSD needs no desktop presence whatsoever to be extraordinarily successful. I've never installed it on the desktop. I've never seen anybody install it on the desktop. Not once in 15 years. There is no rationale reason to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I'll go further and say I will likely never see X-Windows run on OpenBSD. And, as for a niche - I consider OpenBSD to be the pre-eminent platform for Firewalling, IPsec, IPv6. Their continual focus on consistency makes the system a joy to use - all of the lessons I learned in 2001/2002 are almost 100% (hell, they might be 100%) applicable to managing an OpenBSD system today. They may be a niche but it's a pretty darn big one. With regards to your argument regarding "upstream" support - most of the upstream support required is around elements that are not associated with the desktop, and, in many areas, openBSD has just decided to rewrite the upstream contribuions in their own "OpenBSDsh" way anyways. I'm confident they will do fine even if upstream support for desktop, and associated applications, no longer considers BSD as a first-rate platform.

olgeni 14y ago

> that point of view has resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace, etc. However, it will probably work just fine on a cloud platform based on KVM.