6 ms·

Anyone here using OpenBSD? If so, for what purpose? I’ve always wanted to use NetBSD for an application for an embedded system / IoT device but never had the p

by clbrmbr 5mo ago

Anyone here using OpenBSD? If so, for what purpose? I’ve always wanted to use NetBSD for an application for an embedded system / IoT device but never had the pleasure (yet!).

6r17 5mo ago
open-bsd will always feel like a safe pick for anything in regard to vault or key holding ; it's not appropriate to run anything CPU intensive - but it's a very appropriate system for anything that just need to boot up and hold some data ; eventually expose a network interface.
nelsonic 5mo ago
We use OpenBSD for our VPSes on Hetzner, bare metal (for security focussed clients) and older (but still good) hardware in our Home Lab. OpenBSD is excellent on older (no longer supported by Cupertino) Apple hardware. We have an Intel Mac Mini Cluster with near-perfect uptime. If you need to run any kind of server (Web, Mail, DNS, NFS, Database) where you need stability & security, look no further. Some learning curve, but totally worth it.
- mxuribe 5mo ago
  Have you tried such Openbsd installations vs FreeBSD? I forget the differences between OpenBSD and FreeBSD, so forgive the naivety. (I think NetBSD is more for embedded stuff, and Ghost and Dragonfly are more for conventional desktop use-cases if i recall correctly.) I'm asking because i have not touched any BSD for over 2 decades...and I'm getting the itch to try some out...and was wondering if for server-type use cases (like you noted) whether OpenBSD is preferred over FreeBSD or the reverse, and why? Thanks in advance for any feedback you might provide!
  - nelsonic 5mo ago
    FreeBSD has the same roots as OpenBSD but the former has a “compatibility” focus whereas the latter has the security focus. Having a background in security, the choice was obvious for me. But each person/org should decide based on their needs. Haven’t had any issues running it on all major hardware (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc) the UI isn’t as pretty as macOS on Desktop, but it runs Firefox & Chrome, etc. so you can do everything you need. If you have an older Lenovo or Mac lying around collecting dust, dive in!
    - riedel 5mo ago
      Actually that is mostly current HW compat. NetBSD would be I guess the one for legacy HW compat.
      - cestith 5mo ago
        OpenBSD does support some older hardware already not supported by, say, most Linux distributions. As an example MacPPC has’t had support from most Linux distributors since IBM Power went little-endian, but OpenBSD runs fine on it. NetBSD is, however, the gold standard for an OS that runs on just about anything. Their (maybe unofficial) slogan has been “Of course it runs NetBSD!”. Their logo has a flag in it because they “plant their flag” on so many platforms. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/
    - wang_li 5mo ago
      There was FreeBSD and NetBSD. NetBSD supporting many platforms while FreeBSD supported just x86. There was some contention between NetBSD developers and Theo and crew left to create OpenBSD. They all more or less have common ancestry being derivatives of 386BSD.
      - mxuribe 5mo ago
        Yeah, i knew there was some aspects of decendancy across the different BSDs. And, I mentioned NetBSD for embedded stuff...but really, i *think* its that NetBsd is simply installed on tons of different hardware....so not only embedded....i kinda remembered that about NetBSD. But, its the other BSDs - in particular FreeBSD vs OpenBSD - that i always forget the differences...but got it now. Thanks!
        Brian_K_White 5mo ago
        freebsd = utility openbsd = security netbsd = portability freebsd: performance, features, drivers, software compat - closest to linux in utility & usability though unlike linux in execution openbsd: safety for exposed services netbsd: portable across many cpu & hardware platforms - big-endian powerpc sun, hitachi sh3 jornada, etc, easiest to port to a new arch
  - SanjayMehta 5mo ago
    OpenBSD is security focused while FreeBSD will remind you of older X-Windows workstations.
    - mxuribe 5mo ago
      Thanks! And, wow, do i miss the old X-window workstations...well, i should clarify that i LOVED those (I think they were Sparc?) workstations that ran Solaris or SunOS back in the day! Man, that takes me back some years...but i really loved those machines! :-)
      - mghackerlady 5mo ago
        OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc). Unfortunately no 68k anymore (okay, technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan)
        brynet 5mo ago
        > OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc) No 32-bit sparc anymore (only UltraSPARC, aka sparc64). No SunOS compatibility (despite Theo de Raadt inventing it for NetBSD, before being copied by other BSDs). https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 > Technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan luna88k, while related, is not 68k. https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
        mghackerlady 5mo ago
        I must've read about the sunos thing somewhere and imagined it still existed. >luna88k, while related, is not 68k I misremembered it as being similar to the relationship between the 6502 and the 65C816
        ninjin 5mo ago
        Modern operating system booting on hardware that is closing in on 40 years old in just over three minutes, this is wild to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s Kenji Aoyama truly is aligned with the best of the hacker spirit. As for getting your hands on a luna88k, I have no clue. The only thing I managed to find was a broken one that sold for ~USD 750 at an online auction.
  - ch_123 5mo ago
    The "lightweight" nature of OpenBSD is a matter of perspective - if you are happy with OpenBSD's feature set, then it's a plus. On the other hand, FreeBSD has a lot of additional features, including ZFS, which may be of interest. The last I checked, FreeBSD was more performant in various benchmarks, particularly regarding multi-core performance.
    - dijit 5mo ago
      FreeBSD has a bit more of a lax attitude historically to security[0] and seems to prefer being reasonably performant and "easy to use" (this is subjective, but they care about supporting packages outside of base very much, and bundle non-FreeBSD produced packages as part of their base). OpenBSD on the other hand is perfectly happy to leave oodles of performance on the table for security. They were the first OS to completely drop Hyperthreading support for example, years before spectre/meltdown. So with these things in mind, FreeBSD is a lot more performant. [0]: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults
  - spauldo 5mo ago
    FreeBSD is a heavier, more capable system, suitable for large servers. It's got its own virtualization platform (bhyve), an LXC-ish container system (jails), native ZFS, dtrace, Linux emulation, and a bunch more. It makes for a decent workstation and has pretty decent hardware support. NetBSD is small and simple. It's a lot like an old-school UNIX. It makes a decent platform for small services. I run bind and dhcpd on a NetBSD machine. The source code is very pleasant to read. It uses the pkgsrc software repository. It's my preferred platform for writing POSIX code. OpenBSD still carries much of the general feel of NetBSD and can fill a similar niche on a network, but the security focus stands out in their documentation, subprojects (OpenSSH, LibreSSL, OpenNTPD, etc.), APIs (see pledge(8)), and policies. It makes for a great firewall. I'd say it also requires the most know-how. All of them have excellent documentation (especially compared to Linux distros) and the base system is developed alongside the kernel, giving you a very consistent experience compared to Linux distros where everything is developed in isolation. If you write C, it's worth keeping a BSD system around just for the manpages and to make sure you're not letting Linuxisms creep into your codebase.
    - mxuribe 5mo ago
      Thank you, this helped alot!
    - tete 5mo ago
      > Linux emulation Just to clarify. It's not emulation in the sense it's slower or something. They call it compatibility layer, which is better, but also nobody knows what it means. This is simplifying a bit, but it's essentially "Linux is just a kernel" so the interface is just Linux syscalls, so the FreeBSD kernel when executing a Linux binary simply answers like Linux (so it has those system calls). How this is used in practice is that on your file system you have Ubuntu/RedHat/... "installed" (so the files and the file hierarchy are lying there) and you either directly or in a FreeBSD jail execute things in there or the binary you have. I don't know how well it works in the present but in the past that means you could simply download the Unreal Tournament 2004 multiplayer demo or Enemy Territory or other games and just play them as if you were running Linux, 3D acceleration and all, without VM without real emulating, just the kernel providing what a Linux kernel would provide. Also "heavy" is very very relative and subjective. You can totally have a tiny FreeBSD and a huge OpenBSD and one could argue OpenBSD is "heavy" because it comes with three window managers, an HTTP server, a full blown SMTPD server, ACME client and a ton of stuff that eg a server install of Debian or Ubuntu doesn't come with. But also if you run eg. ZFS things are heavy of course. FreeBSD has however had a time when it tried to strip a lot of stuff from the default install and make stuff either optional or make things available through ports/packages only. And also there are surprises to be had with such overviews: Eg. your Lenovo laptop likely will give you a more "out of the box" experience on OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD with things like simple wifi setup, sound often doing the right thing (work, come out the right place, etc.) compared to FreeBSD. Also with stuff like HTTPD with ACME being available in a simple way after install I'd say OpenBSD is easier than FreeBSD. FreeBSD to me feels a bit more like "it can be everything you want it to be". Ports and packages can be complicated if you just start out, compared to OpenBSDs "just use packages" stance. On OpenBSD things in my experience are more of a "it works or doesn't" and when it works often out of the box and/or with docs, while on FreeBSD it's more like it throws some tools into your direction you can build stuff (poudriere, jails, a build system with many options). So it's really cool if you want flexibility but a bit more like you have to figure out if it's possible and how. But that might simply be because of the use cases I used it for. That said all of them are real general purpose systems, unlike eg. some Linux distributions. So it's not like "OpenBSD is for routers" even though it often seems like it. There are time when the GPU support is better on OpenBSD than FreeBSD's. But also FreeBSD has official NVIDIA drivers, so it's all not that clear cut.
- SanjayMehta 5mo ago
  What's the situation with Broadcom wifi on your intel macs? We've run into instability issues with the newer Linux kernels (starting with 6.x, I think) and have had to stop upgrading.
  - nelsonic 5mo ago
    Ah, we have all connected via Ethernet. Side-stepped the WiFi issue. ;-) But have read of others successfully navigating it.
  - keyle 5mo ago
    I've just setup a new ThinkPad with openbsd. You just need to put the firmware needed on a usb stick, mount it and run one command, fw_update -p ./ It wasn't hard.
- anthk 5mo ago
  I use OpenBSD among Hyperbola GNU/Linux, soon to be rebased from a deblobbed OpenBSD 7.0 hard fork. IT's dumb easy to setup too. Also, I daily use nvi, oksh, oed (a portable ed for GNU/Linux) among Xenocara and CWM, and this way the environment it's almost the same as OBSD but with a GNU/Linux kernel.
  - mghackerlady 5mo ago
    (technically it's just a Linux kernel. GNU doesn't do any kernel work aside from deblob scripts)
    - anthk 5mo ago
      Yeah, I'm aware of FSFLA and Linux Libre, but Hurd is not ready yet and it's being worked on with LLM's (something really anti-GNU, as it's propietary SAAS). https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100... In the end Hyperbola BSD will be more free than OpenBSD and the former GNU maintainers themselves...
      - mghackerlady 5mo ago
        I don't really see the LLM use as anti-GNU. It would be no different if the code was written in a proprietary IDE with fancy code completion. GNU doesn't restrict contributors to using exclusively free software for their contributions (if they did, they likely wouldn't have gotten very far considering how much work apple did on GCC). As long as the license is free and GPL compatible, it isn't inherently non-GNU (though, they'd encourage you not to use a SaSS for your own sake) Now, is LLM code in the hurd a good thing? No, absolutely not. Ignoring the licensing limbo of LLM output that still isn't settled , LLMs make pretty bad code often enough that I wouldn't trust it to work on something as niche and relatively undocumented as the hurd.
        anthk 5mo ago
        A local LLM with GPL compatible input and with options to properly tag the source with a full backtracking of the code? Maybe, but that's not what's happening, but massive license laundering.
- MarsIronPI 5mo ago
  I want to use OpenSMTPD so badly, but it doesn't have proper support for authentication via LDAP (at least, as far as I can tell). It insists on reading plaintext passwords from the LDAP server, rather than BINDing as the user in question.
DASD 5mo ago
Single tenant(and single core) tiny VMs with OpenBSD's VMM hypervisor and confidential computing through AMD-SEV.
mghackerlady 5mo ago
I use it. It's secure, and if your hardware is supported it mostly just works. A good unix experience if you're willing to learn its intricacies
INTPenis 5mo ago
Not really, but OpenBSD has been in my life for 25 years. I used OpenBSD to create the firewalls for our LAN parties when I was at school. The first shellserver I ran, on an UltraSparc IIi was OpenBSD, gave out accounts to my friends. And then I used it as a firewall, both professionally and personally, for many years. Until the first Turris Omnia was released, and now I have retired even Turris for pfSense, which is FreeBSD I believe. But the PF firewall in OpenBSD was superior, definitely to the syntax of IPtables. To me Linux was a great server OS, and OpenBSD was a great FW/Gateway OS.
Galanwe 5mo ago
I use it on my personal laptop, essentially because I like how slim and simple it is. Packaging is simple, kernel development and upgrade is simple, etc. Also the kernel code itself is written in a style I like, it's to the point, no useless abstractions, no fuss. I prefer it even amongst other BSDs I tried (netbsd and free*lbsd/dragonfly). It just feels nice to be able to understand most of your system. It's not as fully featured as Linux, but there is a sense of understanding your system that is refreshing. A bit like if you're on vacation in a small and cute village where life is mundane and calming. At least that's how I feel with it. Mileage may vary.
- sshine 5mo ago
  > I like how slim and simple it is. I ran OpenBSD on my laptop 22 years ago. Back then, a full GUI environment with terminal, web browser, editor: 28MiB of memory for the whole operating system and user environment!
  - bluedino 5mo ago
    About 10 years ago we moved offices, and I was over checking out the new internet circuit and cabling in the office. The circuit was up, and I hadn't brought anything with me to connect to the network, but we had already moved some boxes of old stuff over. I found a 10+ year old Dell Pentium III laptop in one of the boxes, installed OpenBSD to do some simple connectivity testing, and ended up with a full workstation install and using it for network monitoring and some other random stuff. It stayed in the network/server closet until we moved out of that building just a few years ago.
- rootnod3 5mo ago
  This. A while ago I made some blog posts[1] diving into the source code of OpenBSD and FreeBSD (shameless self plug), but haven't had the time recently to write more. Being able to understand the system, or at least being able to take a quick look when something doesn't work is very refreshing. Not to mention the outstanding man pages. Barely need to google things. [1]: https://blog.wollwage.com/ https://blog.wollwage.com/
- 5mo ago
seethishat 5mo ago
I run it. Home firewall, office desktops and laptops. It's pretty stable and I'm fairly familiar with it. Really simple if you know Unix. I hope it never goes away, not sure what I would replace it with. Linux is so complicated now, it's just too much for me to deal with
- CodeCompost 5mo ago
  What software do you run on your desktops and laptops?
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    Not GP, but I mostly use: Firefox; Emacs; MPV; Keepass; calibre; xfe; mupdf;... Then a bunch of cli tools. There's a lot in base, so cli are mostly extra utilities like cmus, git, tig, ncdu,...
    - 2b3a51 5mo ago
      I would imagine that a lot of people who use OpenBSD on their laptops/desktops run a lean installation with one of the window managers in base (an ancient fvwm version, cwm which I find very nice and twm). You can however have a full-fat desktop environment with xfce4 or gnome and applications like libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, audacity and so on if you wish. I've never tried KDE on top of OpenBSD base but I gather packages are in ports. I think it is fair to say that the amd64 arch has good support. The i386 platform arch is on a 'best effort' basis these days which is understandable. I've never looked at the others.
      - mghackerlady 5mo ago
        SPARC is well supported (mostly because it's very good at finding bugs that wouldn't be big problems anywhere else despite not being 'correct') and big endian PowerPC (both 323 and 64) is fine, though hardware can be tricky since apple products tend to be so integrated that you can't really, say, replace a GPU because the support is poor
      - 5mo ago
sjmulder 5mo ago
Web/SSH/mail server using the built in httpd, sshd and smtpd. Very happy with it. And on my laptop, occasionally, to experience it in person.
ectospheno 5mo ago
I use it for home router, my laptop, several vms for various services, and on one vps I keep around should I need to quickly set something up. I keep a proxmox server for anything I can’t or won’t run on OpenBSD.
whalesalad 5mo ago
I needed to create a backdoor network-level KVM contraption to help my dad relocate some servers. tl;dr an office was closing down, he pulled the rack and stood it up in his basement. I mailed him a unifi edgerouter 4 that was reflashed to run openbsd. On boot it would create a vpn tunnel to a vps and basically expose a public WAN port to the rack. So it was in my dads garage on his Fios internet, but from a networking perspective it thought that it was in a Linode datacenter. The ER4 has 3 ports: 1 was for the uplink, one exposed the WAN connection to the rack, and then the 3rd port became a client inside of the network. I could shell into it from home (he's on the other side of the country) and operate from the residential network and also the server network simultaneously. Worked well enough for a few weeks to keep access around until we could engineer a better solution. Configuring OpenBSD was really quite simple and rewarding. No insane linux network stack / netplan / cloud-init / bs ... just a few conf files. obligatory pic: https://i.imgur.com/Mkf9ckc.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mkf9ckc.jpeg
she46BiOmUerPVj 5mo ago
Been running it as my home router since 2.3. I had it on a server for a very short time when I used hardware RAID but I replaced that quickly with FreeBSD for ZFS once I could afford to replace that old Dell. I ran it on my personal laptop for several years when I had one, but having a work laptop for these past decades I don't have much use for a personal laptop. I would probably run it again on a nice portable when I retire. It would be nice to focus on being creative on such a machine. Coding and drawing mostly. I will continue to use Linux in my recording studio though.
rootnod3 5mo ago
I use it for my mailserver (thank you openbsd.amsterdam), for the gateway in my homelab, a dedicated OpenBSD VMD machine in my homelab, and on personal machines (Macbook Air M2, a Thinkpad X220 and on a T480 that dualboots OpenBSD/FreeBSD). For mailserver I think it is the best option. And for Gateway, PF is just wonderful. But even on my laptops I enjoy it. It is rock solid, and I have pretty much no complaints.
black_knight 5mo ago
I use OpenBSD for my home server. Runs everything from httpd to a Minecraft server.
idatum 5mo ago
Runs well on my Lenovo T-490. I use this as my main non-Windows laptop.
dbolgheroni 5mo ago
Running OpenBSD 7.9 with KDE 6.6.4. Desktop usage.
gregnavis 5mo ago
My wife and I are building a wedding rentals company. I'm responsible for the digital part and building a Ruby on Rails app deployed to OpenBSD. The entire thing runs on a cheap Supermirco U1 server in a rack at our home. :-)
hedora 5mo ago
I’ve been using it on an old PC Engines router (great hardware, by the way! I wish they were still around.) It ran for over 8 years without downtime, but I’ve had repeated problems in the last year or so. I used the default partitioning scheme, which makes /usr tiny, and /var huge, and since it is a router, did not install X11. At some point, they made x11 mandatory for auto updates. This is dumb, because all the upgrade tool is doing is untarring a list of tarballs. So, I had to perform partition surgery from the upgrade ramdisk to make room for X11. Now, they made some ASLR relinking scheme mandatory, which makes sense, except the relink directory is 1.5GB (larger than the entire rest of the distribution, and far larger than the parts I voluntarily installed!). For some reason the relink output files go in /usr, which, by default, won’t hold it at upgrade. It really belongs in /var, because it is not immutable, and also, there’s room there! So, I had to repartition the router from a rescue environment again. They also removed the ability for ntp to sync on machines without cmos clocks, and the alternate config options don’t seem to work. That’s a bit more niche, granted, but my router hw is reasonably common for openbsd use and has that property. You can make it work by using a second utility to force clock sync at boot. I like that they keep things simple, but they also recently pulled out any semblance of power loss safety for their file system. I’ve had to serial console in a few times to run fsck, which isn’t really the behavior I want from the home router! They don’t have any way to setup DDNS in the base install, so you have to use a port or pkg. The port I chose was EOL’ed by upstream (ISC), so I’ll probably need to switch to dnsmasq as a dhcp server / dns server, which is fine, but those services are a significant fraction of the attack surface of my router. DDNS seems like a pretty simple thing to implement, and would be really high value for router use cases. Without it, I’d have to assign static addresses to everything on the LAN, then edit DNS records. I think all this stuff is fixable, but wish they’d take the niche of “rock solid secure infrastructure” a bit more seriously. This used to be a nice “set and forget” weekend project but now it requires attention every few release cycles. 7.8 barely managed to fit in my duct tape and bailing wire partition layout. I’m probably going to switch to freebsd on a box with faster NICs when I finally get a > 1GBit internet connection (hopefully in the next year or so). If I upgrade to 7.9, I’ll have to give up on using the openbsd hypervisor, since, with the partition scheme that the installer chose, there will no longer be a partition large enough to hold the download sets and also the vm image. This is particularly frustrating because the boot drive is under 50% full. I’d just do “one big partition”, but they warn against that for good reason - it complicates manual fs repair at boot. Anyway, I really like the project. It would be nice if they did a “fix common papercuts” release, since I doubt many users are as patient as I am. If you are looking to install it, either use fewer partitions, or way over provision storage (I was 10x over provisioned at install, and the stuff I use hasn’t grown more than 10-20%) and also make sure you choose much larger partition sizes than recommended. This will add under $100 to your hardware cost, even with the storage shortages.
SoftTalker 5mo ago
It has been my daily driver for years.
binkHN 5mo ago
It is, by far, my first choice for a router/firewall. It has so many niceties for this, all well integrated OOTB, and you can deploy something top notch in no time at all.
t-3 5mo ago
I've been running OpenBSD on my main laptop for about a decade, as well as on routers. It has the most consistent and well-designed interfaces of any modern *nix other than arguably macOS.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
fmajid 5mo ago
My home router, firewall and VPN gateway is an OpenBSD box, Intel N100 with quad 2.5G Ethernet. To be frank, Linux has better support for fighting bufferbloat with FC-CoDel, but pf is so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close. WiFi is handled separately by a Ubiquiti UniFi system, but I don't trust Ubiquiti not to exfiltrate data after their underhanded attempt to turn telemetry on a few years ago. OpenBSD WiFI is somewhat mediocre, but it has improved in this release with experimental support for WiFi 6 after years of being stuck at 802.11n. The closest you will get to the OpenBSD experience on Linux is with Alpine Linux.
- seniorThrowaway 5mo ago
  >so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close. This is a big one for me. I've run openBSD and Linux custom boxes as SoHo routers and I just cannot stand Linux firewalls, I've never liked them and IPTables is just terrible. Yes I know there are wrappers around it now but it's still the default everywhere and still used by lots of other software like Docker. I'm using OPNSense now which is FreeBSD based instead of completely rolling my own but I love that it is still BSD under the hood. One differing opinion I will offer is that I find NixOS to be the Linux distro most in the openBSD spirit despite it being very different from a UX and config management perspective. Alpine is interesting, but it has its own security and compatibility issues, especially around MUSL libc which I have had cause many strange downstream issues over the years, I just hit one recently in JVM GC caused by its memory allocation implementation. I've stopped using alpine altogether because of them.
WhyNotHugo 5mo ago
I use it for my home router, a small home server, a personal VPS at https://openbsd.amsterdam https://openbsd.amsterdam and a development VM (mostly for testing BSD backends on portable software). I wish I had an OpenBSD development laptop, but I don't have one right now.
petee 5mo ago
Authoritative DNS (nsd) and email (opensmtpd) runs out of the box with minimal config on very low ram kvms. The documentation is fantastic, installation is easy; sysupgrade has been a big improvement, though I wish they'd slow the release cycle a little
tete 5mo ago
I do. Multiple things: Work: I need a simple easy to use system that I can configure to meet third party compliance requirements without jumping through hoops. It really excels when you can mostly use the base system there, maybe couple services. For example it's so nice to just have a couple pledge/unveil lines for example in a Go service. Also super nice for "set and forget" style stuff. For example "I just need a HTTPS server with acme and SFTP". That's something you get out of the box with no third party packages (so everything vetted, pledge/unveil for everything, maintenance just running syspatch and sysupgrade), which is really nice. Personal: Private mail server, family website, a quick and dirty "watching streams together" service I set up to watch stuff with people not in the same place as I am. prosody to have XMPP for friends and family. I would NOT use it for "people throw stuff at you" use cases (Linux and FreeBSD do a far better job there). But I absolutely love it for scenarios where you want very very low maintenance. For example that private email server. I don't have time to do big upgrade plans, or "hardening" systems or reinventing the wheel. I cannot afford to do privately what I do in a day job or consulting (setting up or maintaining really rather complicated infrastructure). I have done that many years with Debian, but the Linux world sadly is a big complex and complicated mess. That's great, when I get paid to deal with it, but annoying otherwise. And I don't mean that bashing wise. I use Linux, I like Linux, but somehow there is a huge drive to overengineering and then building hacks and weird workarounds that become normalized until it's a proper job. Without wanting to start a flame war, but the whole Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Orchestrators, etc. story is a lot of reinventing the wheel and a static executable like a Go service in a container, so essentially coming with a whole Linux distribution even though one never thinks about it that way is just really absurd. That's what executables, processes, etc. were invented for. And since I've lived through the story and as mentioned make a limit, I understand how that came to be, but it feels like the industry took a wrong turn because it was cool and exciting and then (nearly) everyone decided to use that hammer for everything one could imagine to be a nail. And then the next layer came and the next and the next. But all of them doing things differently. And suddenly to have a Postgres cluster you need Kubernetes, and Helm, but also need to know both PG config and the orchestrator's config, etc. It's a mess and the OpenBSD people somehow knew that decades before I did.

by clbrmbr 5mo ago

Anyone here using OpenBSD? If so, for what purpose? I’ve always wanted to use NetBSD for an application for an embedded system / IoT device but never had the pleasure (yet!).

6r17 5mo ago

open-bsd will always feel like a safe pick for anything in regard to vault or key holding ; it's not appropriate to run anything CPU intensive - but it's a very appropriate system for anything that just need to boot up and hold some data ; eventually expose a network interface.

nelsonic 5mo ago

We use OpenBSD for our VPSes on Hetzner, bare metal (for security focussed clients) and older (but still good) hardware in our Home Lab. OpenBSD is excellent on older (no longer supported by Cupertino) Apple hardware. We have an Intel Mac Mini Cluster with near-perfect uptime. If you need to run any kind of server (Web, Mail, DNS, NFS, Database) where you need stability & security, look no further. Some learning curve, but totally worth it.

mxuribe 5mo ago
Have you tried such Openbsd installations vs FreeBSD? I forget the differences between OpenBSD and FreeBSD, so forgive the naivety. (I think NetBSD is more for embedded stuff, and Ghost and Dragonfly are more for conventional desktop use-cases if i recall correctly.) I'm asking because i have not touched any BSD for over 2 decades...and I'm getting the itch to try some out...and was wondering if for server-type use cases (like you noted) whether OpenBSD is preferred over FreeBSD or the reverse, and why? Thanks in advance for any feedback you might provide!
- nelsonic 5mo ago
  FreeBSD has the same roots as OpenBSD but the former has a “compatibility” focus whereas the latter has the security focus. Having a background in security, the choice was obvious for me. But each person/org should decide based on their needs. Haven’t had any issues running it on all major hardware (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc) the UI isn’t as pretty as macOS on Desktop, but it runs Firefox & Chrome, etc. so you can do everything you need. If you have an older Lenovo or Mac lying around collecting dust, dive in!
  - riedel 5mo ago
    Actually that is mostly current HW compat. NetBSD would be I guess the one for legacy HW compat.
    - cestith 5mo ago
      OpenBSD does support some older hardware already not supported by, say, most Linux distributions. As an example MacPPC has’t had support from most Linux distributors since IBM Power went little-endian, but OpenBSD runs fine on it. NetBSD is, however, the gold standard for an OS that runs on just about anything. Their (maybe unofficial) slogan has been “Of course it runs NetBSD!”. Their logo has a flag in it because they “plant their flag” on so many platforms. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/
  - wang_li 5mo ago
    There was FreeBSD and NetBSD. NetBSD supporting many platforms while FreeBSD supported just x86. There was some contention between NetBSD developers and Theo and crew left to create OpenBSD. They all more or less have common ancestry being derivatives of 386BSD.
    - mxuribe 5mo ago
      Yeah, i knew there was some aspects of decendancy across the different BSDs. And, I mentioned NetBSD for embedded stuff...but really, i *think* its that NetBsd is simply installed on tons of different hardware....so not only embedded....i kinda remembered that about NetBSD. But, its the other BSDs - in particular FreeBSD vs OpenBSD - that i always forget the differences...but got it now. Thanks!
      - Brian_K_White 5mo ago
        freebsd = utility openbsd = security netbsd = portability freebsd: performance, features, drivers, software compat - closest to linux in utility & usability though unlike linux in execution openbsd: safety for exposed services netbsd: portable across many cpu & hardware platforms - big-endian powerpc sun, hitachi sh3 jornada, etc, easiest to port to a new arch
- SanjayMehta 5mo ago
  OpenBSD is security focused while FreeBSD will remind you of older X-Windows workstations.
  - mxuribe 5mo ago
    Thanks! And, wow, do i miss the old X-window workstations...well, i should clarify that i LOVED those (I think they were Sparc?) workstations that ran Solaris or SunOS back in the day! Man, that takes me back some years...but i really loved those machines! :-)
    - mghackerlady 5mo ago
      OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc). Unfortunately no 68k anymore (okay, technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan)
      - brynet 5mo ago
        > OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc) No 32-bit sparc anymore (only UltraSPARC, aka sparc64). No SunOS compatibility (despite Theo de Raadt inventing it for NetBSD, before being copied by other BSDs). https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 > Technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan luna88k, while related, is not 68k. https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
        mghackerlady 5mo ago
        I must've read about the sunos thing somewhere and imagined it still existed. >luna88k, while related, is not 68k I misremembered it as being similar to the relationship between the 6502 and the 65C816
        ninjin 5mo ago
        Modern operating system booting on hardware that is closing in on 40 years old in just over three minutes, this is wild to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s Kenji Aoyama truly is aligned with the best of the hacker spirit. As for getting your hands on a luna88k, I have no clue. The only thing I managed to find was a broken one that sold for ~USD 750 at an online auction.
- ch_123 5mo ago
  The "lightweight" nature of OpenBSD is a matter of perspective - if you are happy with OpenBSD's feature set, then it's a plus. On the other hand, FreeBSD has a lot of additional features, including ZFS, which may be of interest. The last I checked, FreeBSD was more performant in various benchmarks, particularly regarding multi-core performance.
  - dijit 5mo ago
    FreeBSD has a bit more of a lax attitude historically to security[0] and seems to prefer being reasonably performant and "easy to use" (this is subjective, but they care about supporting packages outside of base very much, and bundle non-FreeBSD produced packages as part of their base). OpenBSD on the other hand is perfectly happy to leave oodles of performance on the table for security. They were the first OS to completely drop Hyperthreading support for example, years before spectre/meltdown. So with these things in mind, FreeBSD is a lot more performant. [0]: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults
- spauldo 5mo ago
  FreeBSD is a heavier, more capable system, suitable for large servers. It's got its own virtualization platform (bhyve), an LXC-ish container system (jails), native ZFS, dtrace, Linux emulation, and a bunch more. It makes for a decent workstation and has pretty decent hardware support. NetBSD is small and simple. It's a lot like an old-school UNIX. It makes a decent platform for small services. I run bind and dhcpd on a NetBSD machine. The source code is very pleasant to read. It uses the pkgsrc software repository. It's my preferred platform for writing POSIX code. OpenBSD still carries much of the general feel of NetBSD and can fill a similar niche on a network, but the security focus stands out in their documentation, subprojects (OpenSSH, LibreSSL, OpenNTPD, etc.), APIs (see pledge(8)), and policies. It makes for a great firewall. I'd say it also requires the most know-how. All of them have excellent documentation (especially compared to Linux distros) and the base system is developed alongside the kernel, giving you a very consistent experience compared to Linux distros where everything is developed in isolation. If you write C, it's worth keeping a BSD system around just for the manpages and to make sure you're not letting Linuxisms creep into your codebase.
  - mxuribe 5mo ago
    Thank you, this helped alot!
  - tete 5mo ago
    > Linux emulation Just to clarify. It's not emulation in the sense it's slower or something. They call it compatibility layer, which is better, but also nobody knows what it means. This is simplifying a bit, but it's essentially "Linux is just a kernel" so the interface is just Linux syscalls, so the FreeBSD kernel when executing a Linux binary simply answers like Linux (so it has those system calls). How this is used in practice is that on your file system you have Ubuntu/RedHat/... "installed" (so the files and the file hierarchy are lying there) and you either directly or in a FreeBSD jail execute things in there or the binary you have. I don't know how well it works in the present but in the past that means you could simply download the Unreal Tournament 2004 multiplayer demo or Enemy Territory or other games and just play them as if you were running Linux, 3D acceleration and all, without VM without real emulating, just the kernel providing what a Linux kernel would provide. Also "heavy" is very very relative and subjective. You can totally have a tiny FreeBSD and a huge OpenBSD and one could argue OpenBSD is "heavy" because it comes with three window managers, an HTTP server, a full blown SMTPD server, ACME client and a ton of stuff that eg a server install of Debian or Ubuntu doesn't come with. But also if you run eg. ZFS things are heavy of course. FreeBSD has however had a time when it tried to strip a lot of stuff from the default install and make stuff either optional or make things available through ports/packages only. And also there are surprises to be had with such overviews: Eg. your Lenovo laptop likely will give you a more "out of the box" experience on OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD with things like simple wifi setup, sound often doing the right thing (work, come out the right place, etc.) compared to FreeBSD. Also with stuff like HTTPD with ACME being available in a simple way after install I'd say OpenBSD is easier than FreeBSD. FreeBSD to me feels a bit more like "it can be everything you want it to be". Ports and packages can be complicated if you just start out, compared to OpenBSDs "just use packages" stance. On OpenBSD things in my experience are more of a "it works or doesn't" and when it works often out of the box and/or with docs, while on FreeBSD it's more like it throws some tools into your direction you can build stuff (poudriere, jails, a build system with many options). So it's really cool if you want flexibility but a bit more like you have to figure out if it's possible and how. But that might simply be because of the use cases I used it for. That said all of them are real general purpose systems, unlike eg. some Linux distributions. So it's not like "OpenBSD is for routers" even though it often seems like it. There are time when the GPU support is better on OpenBSD than FreeBSD's. But also FreeBSD has official NVIDIA drivers, so it's all not that clear cut.
SanjayMehta 5mo ago
What's the situation with Broadcom wifi on your intel macs? We've run into instability issues with the newer Linux kernels (starting with 6.x, I think) and have had to stop upgrading.
- nelsonic 5mo ago
  Ah, we have all connected via Ethernet. Side-stepped the WiFi issue. ;-) But have read of others successfully navigating it.
- keyle 5mo ago
  I've just setup a new ThinkPad with openbsd. You just need to put the firmware needed on a usb stick, mount it and run one command, fw_update -p ./ It wasn't hard.
anthk 5mo ago
I use OpenBSD among Hyperbola GNU/Linux, soon to be rebased from a deblobbed OpenBSD 7.0 hard fork. IT's dumb easy to setup too. Also, I daily use nvi, oksh, oed (a portable ed for GNU/Linux) among Xenocara and CWM, and this way the environment it's almost the same as OBSD but with a GNU/Linux kernel.
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  (technically it's just a Linux kernel. GNU doesn't do any kernel work aside from deblob scripts)
  - anthk 5mo ago
    Yeah, I'm aware of FSFLA and Linux Libre, but Hurd is not ready yet and it's being worked on with LLM's (something really anti-GNU, as it's propietary SAAS). https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100... In the end Hyperbola BSD will be more free than OpenBSD and the former GNU maintainers themselves...
    - mghackerlady 5mo ago
      I don't really see the LLM use as anti-GNU. It would be no different if the code was written in a proprietary IDE with fancy code completion. GNU doesn't restrict contributors to using exclusively free software for their contributions (if they did, they likely wouldn't have gotten very far considering how much work apple did on GCC). As long as the license is free and GPL compatible, it isn't inherently non-GNU (though, they'd encourage you not to use a SaSS for your own sake) Now, is LLM code in the hurd a good thing? No, absolutely not. Ignoring the licensing limbo of LLM output that still isn't settled , LLMs make pretty bad code often enough that I wouldn't trust it to work on something as niche and relatively undocumented as the hurd.
      - anthk 5mo ago
        A local LLM with GPL compatible input and with options to properly tag the source with a full backtracking of the code? Maybe, but that's not what's happening, but massive license laundering.
MarsIronPI 5mo ago
I want to use OpenSMTPD so badly, but it doesn't have proper support for authentication via LDAP (at least, as far as I can tell). It insists on reading plaintext passwords from the LDAP server, rather than BINDing as the user in question.

DASD 5mo ago

Single tenant(and single core) tiny VMs with OpenBSD's VMM hypervisor and confidential computing through AMD-SEV.

mghackerlady 5mo ago

I use it. It's secure, and if your hardware is supported it mostly just works. A good unix experience if you're willing to learn its intricacies

INTPenis 5mo ago

Not really, but OpenBSD has been in my life for 25 years. I used OpenBSD to create the firewalls for our LAN parties when I was at school. The first shellserver I ran, on an UltraSparc IIi was OpenBSD, gave out accounts to my friends. And then I used it as a firewall, both professionally and personally, for many years. Until the first Turris Omnia was released, and now I have retired even Turris for pfSense, which is FreeBSD I believe. But the PF firewall in OpenBSD was superior, definitely to the syntax of IPtables. To me Linux was a great server OS, and OpenBSD was a great FW/Gateway OS.

Galanwe 5mo ago

I use it on my personal laptop, essentially because I like how slim and simple it is. Packaging is simple, kernel development and upgrade is simple, etc. Also the kernel code itself is written in a style I like, it's to the point, no useless abstractions, no fuss. I prefer it even amongst other BSDs I tried (netbsd and free*lbsd/dragonfly). It just feels nice to be able to understand most of your system. It's not as fully featured as Linux, but there is a sense of understanding your system that is refreshing. A bit like if you're on vacation in a small and cute village where life is mundane and calming. At least that's how I feel with it. Mileage may vary.

sshine 5mo ago
> I like how slim and simple it is. I ran OpenBSD on my laptop 22 years ago. Back then, a full GUI environment with terminal, web browser, editor: 28MiB of memory for the whole operating system and user environment!
- bluedino 5mo ago
  About 10 years ago we moved offices, and I was over checking out the new internet circuit and cabling in the office. The circuit was up, and I hadn't brought anything with me to connect to the network, but we had already moved some boxes of old stuff over. I found a 10+ year old Dell Pentium III laptop in one of the boxes, installed OpenBSD to do some simple connectivity testing, and ended up with a full workstation install and using it for network monitoring and some other random stuff. It stayed in the network/server closet until we moved out of that building just a few years ago.
rootnod3 5mo ago
This. A while ago I made some blog posts[1] diving into the source code of OpenBSD and FreeBSD (shameless self plug), but haven't had the time recently to write more. Being able to understand the system, or at least being able to take a quick look when something doesn't work is very refreshing. Not to mention the outstanding man pages. Barely need to google things. [1]: https://blog.wollwage.com/ https://blog.wollwage.com/
5mo ago

seethishat 5mo ago

I run it. Home firewall, office desktops and laptops. It's pretty stable and I'm fairly familiar with it. Really simple if you know Unix. I hope it never goes away, not sure what I would replace it with. Linux is so complicated now, it's just too much for me to deal with

CodeCompost 5mo ago
What software do you run on your desktops and laptops?
- skydhash 5mo ago
  Not GP, but I mostly use: Firefox; Emacs; MPV; Keepass; calibre; xfe; mupdf;... Then a bunch of cli tools. There's a lot in base, so cli are mostly extra utilities like cmus, git, tig, ncdu,...
  - 2b3a51 5mo ago
    I would imagine that a lot of people who use OpenBSD on their laptops/desktops run a lean installation with one of the window managers in base (an ancient fvwm version, cwm which I find very nice and twm). You can however have a full-fat desktop environment with xfce4 or gnome and applications like libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, audacity and so on if you wish. I've never tried KDE on top of OpenBSD base but I gather packages are in ports. I think it is fair to say that the amd64 arch has good support. The i386 platform arch is on a 'best effort' basis these days which is understandable. I've never looked at the others.
    - mghackerlady 5mo ago
      SPARC is well supported (mostly because it's very good at finding bugs that wouldn't be big problems anywhere else despite not being 'correct') and big endian PowerPC (both 323 and 64) is fine, though hardware can be tricky since apple products tend to be so integrated that you can't really, say, replace a GPU because the support is poor
    - 5mo ago

sjmulder 5mo ago

Web/SSH/mail server using the built in httpd, sshd and smtpd. Very happy with it. And on my laptop, occasionally, to experience it in person.

ectospheno 5mo ago

I use it for home router, my laptop, several vms for various services, and on one vps I keep around should I need to quickly set something up. I keep a proxmox server for anything I can’t or won’t run on OpenBSD.

whalesalad 5mo ago

I needed to create a backdoor network-level KVM contraption to help my dad relocate some servers. tl;dr an office was closing down, he pulled the rack and stood it up in his basement. I mailed him a unifi edgerouter 4 that was reflashed to run openbsd. On boot it would create a vpn tunnel to a vps and basically expose a public WAN port to the rack. So it was in my dads garage on his Fios internet, but from a networking perspective it thought that it was in a Linode datacenter. The ER4 has 3 ports: 1 was for the uplink, one exposed the WAN connection to the rack, and then the 3rd port became a client inside of the network. I could shell into it from home (he's on the other side of the country) and operate from the residential network and also the server network simultaneously. Worked well enough for a few weeks to keep access around until we could engineer a better solution. Configuring OpenBSD was really quite simple and rewarding. No insane linux network stack / netplan / cloud-init / bs ... just a few conf files. obligatory pic: https://i.imgur.com/Mkf9ckc.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mkf9ckc.jpeg

she46BiOmUerPVj 5mo ago

Been running it as my home router since 2.3. I had it on a server for a very short time when I used hardware RAID but I replaced that quickly with FreeBSD for ZFS once I could afford to replace that old Dell. I ran it on my personal laptop for several years when I had one, but having a work laptop for these past decades I don't have much use for a personal laptop. I would probably run it again on a nice portable when I retire. It would be nice to focus on being creative on such a machine. Coding and drawing mostly. I will continue to use Linux in my recording studio though.

rootnod3 5mo ago

I use it for my mailserver (thank you openbsd.amsterdam), for the gateway in my homelab, a dedicated OpenBSD VMD machine in my homelab, and on personal machines (Macbook Air M2, a Thinkpad X220 and on a T480 that dualboots OpenBSD/FreeBSD). For mailserver I think it is the best option. And for Gateway, PF is just wonderful. But even on my laptops I enjoy it. It is rock solid, and I have pretty much no complaints.

black_knight 5mo ago

I use OpenBSD for my home server. Runs everything from httpd to a Minecraft server.

idatum 5mo ago

Runs well on my Lenovo T-490. I use this as my main non-Windows laptop.

dbolgheroni 5mo ago

Running OpenBSD 7.9 with KDE 6.6.4. Desktop usage.

gregnavis 5mo ago

My wife and I are building a wedding rentals company. I'm responsible for the digital part and building a Ruby on Rails app deployed to OpenBSD. The entire thing runs on a cheap Supermirco U1 server in a rack at our home. :-)

hedora 5mo ago

I’ve been using it on an old PC Engines router (great hardware, by the way! I wish they were still around.) It ran for over 8 years without downtime, but I’ve had repeated problems in the last year or so. I used the default partitioning scheme, which makes /usr tiny, and /var huge, and since it is a router, did not install X11. At some point, they made x11 mandatory for auto updates. This is dumb, because all the upgrade tool is doing is untarring a list of tarballs. So, I had to perform partition surgery from the upgrade ramdisk to make room for X11. Now, they made some ASLR relinking scheme mandatory, which makes sense, except the relink directory is 1.5GB (larger than the entire rest of the distribution, and far larger than the parts I voluntarily installed!). For some reason the relink output files go in /usr, which, by default, won’t hold it at upgrade. It really belongs in /var, because it is not immutable, and also, there’s room there! So, I had to repartition the router from a rescue environment again. They also removed the ability for ntp to sync on machines without cmos clocks, and the alternate config options don’t seem to work. That’s a bit more niche, granted, but my router hw is reasonably common for openbsd use and has that property. You can make it work by using a second utility to force clock sync at boot. I like that they keep things simple, but they also recently pulled out any semblance of power loss safety for their file system. I’ve had to serial console in a few times to run fsck, which isn’t really the behavior I want from the home router! They don’t have any way to setup DDNS in the base install, so you have to use a port or pkg. The port I chose was EOL’ed by upstream (ISC), so I’ll probably need to switch to dnsmasq as a dhcp server / dns server, which is fine, but those services are a significant fraction of the attack surface of my router. DDNS seems like a pretty simple thing to implement, and would be really high value for router use cases. Without it, I’d have to assign static addresses to everything on the LAN, then edit DNS records. I think all this stuff is fixable, but wish they’d take the niche of “rock solid secure infrastructure” a bit more seriously. This used to be a nice “set and forget” weekend project but now it requires attention every few release cycles. 7.8 barely managed to fit in my duct tape and bailing wire partition layout. I’m probably going to switch to freebsd on a box with faster NICs when I finally get a > 1GBit internet connection (hopefully in the next year or so). If I upgrade to 7.9, I’ll have to give up on using the openbsd hypervisor, since, with the partition scheme that the installer chose, there will no longer be a partition large enough to hold the download sets and also the vm image. This is particularly frustrating because the boot drive is under 50% full. I’d just do “one big partition”, but they warn against that for good reason - it complicates manual fs repair at boot. Anyway, I really like the project. It would be nice if they did a “fix common papercuts” release, since I doubt many users are as patient as I am. If you are looking to install it, either use fewer partitions, or way over provision storage (I was 10x over provisioned at install, and the stuff I use hasn’t grown more than 10-20%) and also make sure you choose much larger partition sizes than recommended. This will add under $100 to your hardware cost, even with the storage shortages.

SoftTalker 5mo ago

It has been my daily driver for years.

binkHN 5mo ago

It is, by far, my first choice for a router/firewall. It has so many niceties for this, all well integrated OOTB, and you can deploy something top notch in no time at all.

t-3 5mo ago

I've been running OpenBSD on my main laptop for about a decade, as well as on routers. It has the most consistent and well-designed interfaces of any modern *nix other than arguably macOS.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

fmajid 5mo ago

My home router, firewall and VPN gateway is an OpenBSD box, Intel N100 with quad 2.5G Ethernet. To be frank, Linux has better support for fighting bufferbloat with FC-CoDel, but pf is so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close. WiFi is handled separately by a Ubiquiti UniFi system, but I don't trust Ubiquiti not to exfiltrate data after their underhanded attempt to turn telemetry on a few years ago. OpenBSD WiFI is somewhat mediocre, but it has improved in this release with experimental support for WiFi 6 after years of being stuck at 802.11n. The closest you will get to the OpenBSD experience on Linux is with Alpine Linux.

seniorThrowaway 5mo ago
>so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close. This is a big one for me. I've run openBSD and Linux custom boxes as SoHo routers and I just cannot stand Linux firewalls, I've never liked them and IPTables is just terrible. Yes I know there are wrappers around it now but it's still the default everywhere and still used by lots of other software like Docker. I'm using OPNSense now which is FreeBSD based instead of completely rolling my own but I love that it is still BSD under the hood. One differing opinion I will offer is that I find NixOS to be the Linux distro most in the openBSD spirit despite it being very different from a UX and config management perspective. Alpine is interesting, but it has its own security and compatibility issues, especially around MUSL libc which I have had cause many strange downstream issues over the years, I just hit one recently in JVM GC caused by its memory allocation implementation. I've stopped using alpine altogether because of them.

WhyNotHugo 5mo ago

I use it for my home router, a small home server, a personal VPS at https://openbsd.amsterdam https://openbsd.amsterdam and a development VM (mostly for testing BSD backends on portable software). I wish I had an OpenBSD development laptop, but I don't have one right now.

petee 5mo ago

Authoritative DNS (nsd) and email (opensmtpd) runs out of the box with minimal config on very low ram kvms. The documentation is fantastic, installation is easy; sysupgrade has been a big improvement, though I wish they'd slow the release cycle a little

tete 5mo ago

I do. Multiple things: Work: I need a simple easy to use system that I can configure to meet third party compliance requirements without jumping through hoops. It really excels when you can mostly use the base system there, maybe couple services. For example it's so nice to just have a couple pledge/unveil lines for example in a Go service. Also super nice for "set and forget" style stuff. For example "I just need a HTTPS server with acme and SFTP". That's something you get out of the box with no third party packages (so everything vetted, pledge/unveil for everything, maintenance just running syspatch and sysupgrade), which is really nice. Personal: Private mail server, family website, a quick and dirty "watching streams together" service I set up to watch stuff with people not in the same place as I am. prosody to have XMPP for friends and family. I would NOT use it for "people throw stuff at you" use cases (Linux and FreeBSD do a far better job there). But I absolutely love it for scenarios where you want very very low maintenance. For example that private email server. I don't have time to do big upgrade plans, or "hardening" systems or reinventing the wheel. I cannot afford to do privately what I do in a day job or consulting (setting up or maintaining really rather complicated infrastructure). I have done that many years with Debian, but the Linux world sadly is a big complex and complicated mess. That's great, when I get paid to deal with it, but annoying otherwise. And I don't mean that bashing wise. I use Linux, I like Linux, but somehow there is a huge drive to overengineering and then building hacks and weird workarounds that become normalized until it's a proper job. Without wanting to start a flame war, but the whole Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Orchestrators, etc. story is a lot of reinventing the wheel and a static executable like a Go service in a container, so essentially coming with a whole Linux distribution even though one never thinks about it that way is just really absurd. That's what executables, processes, etc. were invented for. And since I've lived through the story and as mentioned make a limit, I understand how that came to be, but it feels like the industry took a wrong turn because it was cool and exciting and then (nearly) everyone decided to use that hammer for everything one could imagine to be a nail. And then the next layer came and the next and the next. But all of them doing things differently. And suddenly to have a Postgres cluster you need Kubernetes, and Helm, but also need to know both PG config and the orchestrator's config, etc. It's a mess and the OpenBSD people somehow knew that decades before I did.