OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation
sogubsys.com
sogubsys.com
Then I took a second look. I realised that I was spending waaayy too much time getting the laptop usable (usually wifi) and not going enough using it
I bailed for ubuntu and I cannot remember where the network confit is and hate the GUI but I have stopped caring and I just do my work
Sometimes I feel dirty.
I've gone Arch -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian for my main pc, and osx for my laptop. I used to like manually tweaking and configuring everything but these days I just want to turn on the computer and get into a workflow with as few headaches as possible.
It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I still get to tinker and scratch that itch.
I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc.
I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with random bugs :-)
There is a some unix replacement project trying to rewrite major parts "simply". But in the end you just don't understand 90% of what is going on or you have a tiny tiny server.
It's like everything these days is npm - install one thing and suddenly you find there are 900 packages installed including left-pad-0.3.4
I dislike Thinkpads for two reasons:
- They're made by Lenovo. A couple of years ago, Lenovo bundled malware in the BIOS of their laptops [superfish incident]. For that reason, I won't ever again buy a single product from them, since I can't trust them.
- They're ugly. I find most current laptops ugly, so this may be my fault, and by itself it wouldn't be enough of a reason not to buy one. But still.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-rootkit-ensured-its-sof...
I've made my peace with the new layout, but I do miss the old one.
Because I would normally put the Thinkpad in a "a design only an engineer could love" category.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/c/t...
The primary design element is that they are black, other than that they are sort of generic (and hey, a black computer is pretty generic).
Not much in my book. The problem isn't Superfish, the problem is leadership that allowed it.
ThinkPad is from the old IBM teams in Raleigh and Yamato. Lenovo made their own laptops before buying IBM's personal computer division, and that line (and its management) became IdeaPad.
If you're troubled by leadership that would allow Superfish (as I am), buy a ThinkPad, not an IdeaPad.
Previous discussion:
Maybe Lenovo should have thought about their internal structure and their brand reputation before installing malware on their laptops, or maybe not (because they don't care about clients like me, they care about the 90% of bosses that buy bulks of Thinkpads and don't know what firmware is). But anyway, it wasn't a rogue engineer who did it, it was Lenovo, and in my eyes: Lenovo ships malware.
But I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by ruling out ThinkPads just because of a boneheaded decision that Lenovo's consumer division made a few years ago. ThinkPad and IdeaPad really are two separate organizations under one corporate umbrella.
Superfish was not something handed down from on high, it was the bright idea of the consumer group. The ThinkPad team would never go along with something like that; it's not in their DNA and it would destroy their business. Their bread and butter isn't you and me, it's large organizations with IT and security departments who deploy hundreds of ThinkPads at a time and look very closely at the software on them.
Only offering food for thought, it's cool with me whether you buy ThinkPads or something else. :-)
Anyway, I don't usually buy or not buy a computer to send a message. I buy one because it meets my business and personal needs. I've been using ThinkPads for over 20 years, and they have served me very well.
You may choose differently, and of course that's fine.
It sends a message to other manufacturers: add malware at your own peril. I frankly consider it unethical to buy or recommend products from companies, like Lenovo, who demonstrated anti-consumer behavior because it perpetuates bad behavior as companies think consumers will forget or forgive them.
> ThinkPads never had that, and never would.
That is speculative. I can't know that whatever harmful and irrational environment that led to Superfish in IdeaPad won't affect ThinkPads in the future. Even in the most generous understanding where IdeaPad is a different, physically separate branch of the company, and Superfish was an act of incompetence and not outright malice I can't be expected to keep up with the insider intrigue of the company to notice any changes that could negatively affect me. More importantly, leadership is still responsible for setting irrational environment that lead to Superfish, whatever that environment was. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there is no excuse for such incompetence.
I think that they rely on their A team to develop the malware targetting business and government clients, rather than the C team responsible for Superfish.
I've never looked back.
Wholeheartedly agree (but for different reasons than the Thinkpad)
I think the Dell Latitude 7490 competes in the same aesthetic category of the Thinkpad and does a much better job at it. It looks clean and consistent with its own design. I'm not a designer, so I can't pinpoint exactly why, but it feels much cleaner. Thinkpads look cluttered to me.
I don't buy laptops to look good.
A thick laptop with many ports can look just as good as a thin one.
Even if you do, they're still not necessarily exclusive: ifixit tore down a bunch of HP devices, and even the "Elite X2 G4" two-in-one — not exactly a beastly looking device https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Elite-x2-G4-detachable-will... — got 9/10 on repairability: https://www.ifixit.com/News/hp-makes-the-modern-repairable-d...
So where is the thinner obsession coming from? Why are they removing all the ports?
Isn't it because of fashion?
Functionality and esthetics do not have to be mutually exclusive, but the people designing laptops don't seem to be aware of that.
It could also be because they just try to sell whatever it is they think most of their customers believe they want / need (wether or not said customers are right is a whole other matter)
That's the catch isn't it? Manufacturers have a lot of markup on things like RAM and SSD that they'd rather force you to upgrade on their websites than sell without memory.
Anecdata: I was trying to buy a couple of Dell Laptops for our office and the Dell US website has a customize option. Base model had 4 GB RAM and the upgrade to 8 GB RAM was .. drum roll .. approx $67 [1] . Comparable one on Amazon? $37-ish [2]. You will have a lot of fun doing similar comparison with SSDs.
[1]https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-PC4-19200-2400MHz-SODIMM-M471...
Perhaps, but they're prettier than any of the others.
If it had been another laptop, I'm not sure I would have done OpenBSD. I would have done the same testing with Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD and chose the best one for me from that testing.
I don't find the laptop ugly, but then again I don't truly have an opinion of how it looks. I got it to replace my old laptop, and since I couldn't decide what more expensive laptop to get yet, I'm working with this one for now. I wasn't expecting it to be performant and acceptable to me for $200, you know.
I know it’s probably controversial to mention it; but I’m also glad they didn’t buy into the code of conduct saga that waved over FreeBSD and eventually Linux.
I’ve used the OS as a daily driver, it certainly was nice, albeit slow. I would go back if I could avoid some of the Linux/MacOS stuff I really need. I still use it on personal servers and I still really love it.
I send them €50/mo but I don’t feel like it’s enough. I wish they had more resources to bring things like AC Wi-Fi to the fold. Truly impressive work to all involved.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but I thought it started with Linux because Linus swore/ranted/"abused" contributors or something? Or am I thinking of something else?
For a little context though the freebsd code of conduct was instantiated in 14th February 2018 - the Linux one was altered to be the current one on September 21st of the same year (which is when the Linux CoC controversy began).
But the parent comment was, as far as I can tell, intending to use regular quotation marks, in the way a journalist does (and as I just did)—to mention what someone else said, without endorsing or denying that opinion as their own, in order to avoid an argument.
(Personally, I think more things people describe should be put in quotation marks. A lot of Internet arguments are started by people trying to argue others out of beliefs they don't actually personally have.)
> Harassment includes but is not limited to: Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, [...].
-- FreeBSD CoC
Why even bring in the "systemic oppression" part? I can only assume that they'll be more lenient on disparaging comments that don't reinforce "systemic oppression", i.e. they'll apply "positive discrimination", otherwise it makes no sense to include such an expression in the CoC.
I refuse to participate in any project that discriminates people based on their personal traits, that includes "positive discrimination".
Because systematic oppression is more of a systemic problem. Individual problems are easier to solve than systemic problems, i.e, you don’t need a code of conduct to solve a problem with one or two people in your association. If you make one disparaging comment to someone, we can hope that they take that one comment in stride and move on. If you make a disparaging comment that reinforces systemic oppression, it’s no longer a single comment, but it’s part of a larger problem. The way these comments harm the group is that e.g. in response to low-level misogynistic comments, women silently leave the group. You might not even notice this happening until it is too late.
One of the core freedoms which is protected by the first amendment is the freedom of association, and a key part of that is the freedom not to associate with people you don’t like. If you don’t make an explicit choice about who you want in your association, the choice will be made for you by the most toxic members. So you are basically given a choice between an open code of conduct which people can discuss or comment on, or a secret/hidden network of people who make the decisions without any clear way to understand why they make these decisions or how to appeal them.
That’s just my take on it.
You absolutely need a code of conduct (laws) to solve a dispute between two people. That's the whole point of rules.
>If you make one disparaging comment to someone, we can hope that they take that one comment in stride and move on.
This isn't behavior that needs to be tolerated, especially not when the goal of the community is to write software.
This is so counter to my experiences that I have difficulty responding. Have you really never resolved a conflict without appeal to rules? I find this hard to understand.
Rules exist only because systemic problems motivated their creation. You see a sign that says “no dogs” not because dogs aren’t allowed, but because of some systemic problem with dogs in the past. We shouldn’t invent additional rules to solve problems that may or may not exist. That way lies ridiculous bureaucracy.
For example, some organizations (non-profits, HOAs, etc) adopt parliamentary procedure for their meetings. Some don’t. The fact that an organization adopts parliamentary procedures tells you that the specific organization has had problems with people disrupting meetings in the past, or that people in the organization had that problem in other orgs.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
> Harassment includes but is not limited to: Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, [...].
I translate this as: > words, words, words, message worded in such a way as to make it easy to accept and/or normalize, words, words, words
Systemic oppression in used in place of a lack of meaningful, quantified, real oppression. When oppression is your cause and you can't find it you image the structures of society itself are composed of it. Never mind that people are literally dying to come to your country to get some of that good systemic, institutional, oppression. When ideology becomes your religion nothing else matters.
'There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted, and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.'
Essentially it boils down to outlawing vague arrays of behaviour that can apply to essentially anyone and thus must be selectively enforced. I used examples from history surrounding vague laws and the implications that came from that (usually it’s the precursor to huge atrocities or totalitarian regimes. Although I’m certainly not saying they always are).
The wording for the freebsd code of conduct was the most troubling, if you take it at its letter then you basically shouldn’t (or can’t) have non-work discussions because any comment on appearance, lifestyle, diet or even sending “hug” without prior consent is verboten.
It’s also a list of things that are not allowed. Not a way of actually presenting yourself.
Some of the hacker news guidelines are a good example of the inverse: “assume good faith”
The thing is. It comes from a very US-centric political source (geekfeminism) and was barely given any time to be disseminated or discussed, so people were a bit sour- and the handling of criticism only made people more sour
Anyway. This thread doesn’t need us to digress into this topic, and we already have.
I shouldn’t have included that snippet in my comment. I know it’s controversial.
Maybe I come from a different culture (British) but it’s fairly common for people to find something they like about someone else and then comment on it. That can be appearance or other things.
For instance I was at google next last year and I told someone that they had a really nice t-shirt and enquired about where it was purchased. Did I make them uncomfortable?
If I didn’t, is it forbidden?
Does it matter at all to the progress of a project?
And when passes for illegal behavior become the norm for everyday functioning, whoever has the ability to give out passes becomes all-powerful.
Wheaton's law seems to suffice and produce more positive communities. If you find yourself needing to rules-lawyer your contributors -- maybe take a step back and solve some underlying issues instead?
Honestly? That sounds like the system is working as intended. I'm not from the US, never been there, and I wouldn't want the author of such a post on my team either.
In theory I have nothing against codes of conduct. In practice they are too often vague and written by the perennially-offended.
I miss OpenBSD for the certainty of what my system is doing, these other systems I have to use for work some intelligent process comes a long and rewrites my configs or something else annoying.
I've been using wpa_supplicant under the hood for ages, but only recently learned anything about it... and it's actually very good, except that it's CLI interface is so low-level and difficult to use.
For me, my OpenBSD moment was when I used the backlight brightness keys on a laptop in a vt, and it Just Worked™.
wpa_supplicant is an application of the "do one thing" philosophy. The kernel provides a some basic hardware-abstracted plumbing which lets a specialist tool do all the complicated handshaking and what-not for wireless.
This saves the basic tools (ifconfig, ip) from having to build in all that wireless complexity. But it does introduce an extra moving part that has to be configured. For this reason, just bloating it into the basic tool is likely to be good enough, and also provider a superior UX (for nerds like us).
But on OpenBSD thats the only thing it handles, its not an otherwise generic WiFi manager like on linux.
https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html
only half joking
This one is crucial. I see so little respect for tolerance around various projects these days.
I used OpenBSD as my workstation a decade ago and also ran it on a firewall box. However, upgrading the system every six months is tedious: basically, you manually download the files, overwrite the kernel and userland core, and then do a three way merge of /etc. Plus there's a bit of manual work required to deleted unused files and account for moved files:
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade65.html
After that, you still have to upgrade the ports tree (which has gotten easier).
Note that skipping upgrades is not supported.
Security updates between the six month upgrades are handled by monitoring the security list and downloading and applying patches as instructed.
If you are running a bunch of identical servers professionally, it's not much of a burden, but it is if you are upgrading one workstation and a firewall box. I got tight on time and went back to Debian/apt.
Does anyone here know how to do this more efficiently?
(It is a really nice system, and the man pages are superb.)
For example, running syspatch(8) automagically downloads and applies the errata patches.
To upgrade, just curl the new bsd.rd from a mirror, place it in /, reboot, and type `boot bsd.rd` at the boot prompt. Then follow the prompts. I do this on several VPSes via a VNC console. It doesn't take long at all.
Granted, for personal use, I've moved back to Debian as well.
OpenBSD is a great system because it makes sense. If you want to find out how something works. You go to the manual page. A lot of questions about the Operating system can be found on the FAQ.
Much like Arch Linux, I don't find myself needing to Google around forums trying to find a solution. I go to the docs and 99% of the time I will find the solution.
The reasons for using it aren't really that exciting. It is a basic system that works well.
Additionally, the Linux VM cons with vmd are off-putting, but I'll be getting them working. I even saw a blog post about running docker containers on linux on vmd. So, I'm going to try that out soon :D
It isn't my job, it is my hobby.
I can do my job with ssh terminals and a browser.
I like the idea of the computer that I physically interface with being extremely secure. Considering everything I do with virtualization is through a shell and little I do works without the Internet, accepting a bit of extra inconvenience to have that security seems like a decent trade-off.
I was looking for a cheap replacement to my Samsung R580, and found that T420 laptop online on eBay. It had good specs and was priced well (I had to order a new battery that came in today). Originally, I was thinking if it didn't work out, it would hold me over until I decided what higher end would work better (like Matebook or Dell XPS), but the T420 seems to be alright for me. The keyboard is incredible.
Firefox does get sluggish with like 20+ tabs open though. I did start making modifications to it based off https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/ so may that helps (disabling canvas, webrtc, tracking, etc)
I didn't notice anymore delay than normal on other machines, browsers take a bit to start up, but I didn't time it. It is just a perceived speed.
The speed isn't insane or what may be called super fast, but for $200, nothing is slow for me. I mostly live in terminals and browser, and now with Zim.
Some have since been fixed, though no doubt others have arisen, since Firefox is something of a moving target.
I switched from Windows to Linux in 1999. I switched from Linux to Mac in 2003.
I've used Linux natively, it turned into a hack-fest. I spent more time trying to get things working, than getting ACTUAL work done. Using the Linux platform for development is fantastic.
It's when you want to do non-dev related productivity stuff that it got frustrating for me. You had to have workarounds galore. Or you had to have Wine, or you had to have a full Windows VM (when $APP didn't have a good nix-y equivalent).
macOS was great when the computer hardware was prioritized. Then at some point, Apple shifted focus. It was all about a cohesive experience, and integration galore. Then it shifted. Now it's all about iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS. macOS and its hardware have largely taken a back seat. See the MacBook Pro 2016-.
When Apple releases the 2019 MBP and it IMMEDIATELY goes onto the keyboard repair program... you know that in spite of all lip service to the contrary, that Apple gives no fucks about the Apple computer, like they do their gravy train products.
I needed an environment that'd let me still target Linux development, but stay-the-eff-out-of-my-way for productivity stuff. Windows it is. I know that's not what HNer's wanna hear, but the cultural shift at MS and using MS for a dev platform... it's been surprising, and amazing. Not what I'd expected in a million years. #flyingpigs #flameon
Anyone else experience a similar evolution?
I’ve used windows professionally all that time and Windows 10 is the least productive it’s ever been, for me anyway. It’s just such a horrible experience and I don’t know exactly why that is. I didn’t even mind CMD and powershell and it’s not that I dislike Microsoft. I recently traded my personal g-suite in for a Office365 essentials plan, and I’m rather happy with it, but I just can’t get on the right food of Windows 10. I wish I could, the Surface Books are genuinely the modern MacBook Pro, but Ubuntu is just a better experience.
Of course there is still a few quirks, the only one that’s really bothered me is the lack of a Linux One Drive client, which should frankly tell you how little Microsoft has really changed. They don’t intend to be good for Linux, they want Linux to be good for them.
I wanted Microsoft to release a new terminal. It took 2 years. Now that it's out, I want it to support panes. There's only so much they can do at once.
I wanted a good consistent UI experience for Linux. It's been decades and that still hasn't happened. The groups maintaining KDE and Gnome can hardly agree among themselves much less with the userbase.
At this point, I'm more inclined to believe that Microsoft will get things done faster, than the Linux community will.
I'm not slamming Linux, either. Just being realistic after many years/attempts of being user. Better to have a stable and consistent base to work from. If you ask me, that's why so many folks who target Linux for development do it from a non-Linux platform. It makes for a much less frustrating experience.
They’ve certainly opened up, they’ve even open sourced .Net with core. It works with Linux, but it works better if you feed it security through Active Directoy, monitor it with Application insights and deploy it in Azure. There is now a CLI, VSC and Visual Studio for Mac, but Visual Studio for Windows is still light years better. And that’s really the general story. They’ve opened up, but I see it much more as Microsoft understanding the market again than a “new” Microsoft. I’m fine with it, it’s certainly nice to have better products, but I do think it’s the same old story of getting the most out of your environment if you buy all of it from Microsoft. I’m perfectly fine with that by the way, they are a company after all, and if they can make better products than they did before then cool!
I don’t personally think Windows 10 is a better product though. I find it to be one of the most frustrating OSes I’ve ever had to use, aWd that’s why I’m not going windows -> Linux -> Mac -> Windows like you are. I think Ubuntu is a much better experience than Windows 10, but then, I happen to actually really like gnome.
>Speed is not a concern for me.
Is he saying that speed isn't a concern for him in general? If so, why mention that the speed is stellar, then? Or is he saying that the system is so light in general that he doesn't suspect speed will become a problem down the line?
I read it similar to your 2nd take, that the speed is abundant enough that not much needs to be said - its just fast.
Speed is not a concern for me because it is fast for everything I use the laptop for. I didn't hit snags where things were slow.
I'll update the post later for clarity. Thank you for pointing it out.
I'm now using FreeBSD as my main machine for almost a year - really happy with the outcome, but even there some areas, like neural networks for example, are difficult. (But Keras and Theano are there!)
In many aspects OpenBSD was amazing. It needed very little tinkering with to get running properly, configs and ps ax were super-clean. Amazing environment.
The onus is on the user to themselves supply the firmware.
I thought there was an instance where I saw all the access points somehow during the installer, but unsure how I did that... and I couldn't replicate it.
I suspected that I had wired ethernet configured, and then the installer downloaded firmware to configure wireless? It was just a guess, I didn't look more into it.
Excuse me, but this just doesn't make any sense. Applications are the reason we use computers, not OSs, and to have to make such sacrifices is IMHO just silly. The whole OS holy-war thing seems so played out to me...its 2019 just use whatever works..no one care really.
Add to that the apparent political nature of the openbsd "manifesto" and guidelines and I'll just say that I, personally, am not a fan of mixing politics and OSs.
The importance of having a secure and correct OS is most important to me (I feel OpenBSD is most appropriate and interesting here). I feel the value of OpenBSD outweighs the lose of two applications. I'm not part of an OS war, I frankly don't care what anyone uses. I just posted about about my experience on my blog (blogging is a new/rare thing for me and I am proud of the post, it took hours to do) and frankly didn't expect the post to HN to do anything (I posted on a whim, a coworker next to me loves the site) :)
I intended to migrate off of Evernote at some point, it is a tough band-aid to pull off after getting used to it for 10 years. Not having native VirtualBox on the machine is definitely a dislike, but isn't the end of the world. I only need it for labs. NetBSD can apparently run in vmm, too, just have to pass a boot option for the serial console (but I haven't tried it).
For Evernote, I had to ask myself what I'm actually using Evernote for. I'm solely using it for having minimally rich text and website scrapes stored in notebooks, and all notes being searchable. And I want it available wherever I am. I don't use OSR, non-text notes, pro features, related notes, etc. So, I question why I'm still paying for it, entrusting a vendor with all my data, and dealing with non-standard clients outside of windows/mac. Doing something just because I've always done is a terrible pattern. Time to re-evaluate and fix. That's what I did, and now I have an extremely portable and flexible solution that doesn't cost me anything but time, which I'm OK with.
I make a living with Linux for high traffic web applications, I use NetBSD and Linux for my personal servers, and OpenBSD for my workstation. I enjoy operating systems and I'm comfortable in all of them. Each one has their own character, their own quirks and pros and cons. One size fits all, for me, is a fool's game. No matter what you choose, there's some price to be paid for what you get.
And to be crystal clear: I'm not trying to change hearts and minds, or influence others, or be part of some cool kids club. Ultimately, I'm selfish with my hobbies, which this is, and so I do what solely is interesting to me. If I was able to help others, that's great and I'm happy for that, but I have no expectations.
Thank you. I hope we can be on the same page now, and I hope I was not too verbose. Be well.
An update to the article too about VMs: Note that for VMs I'm now using Oracle (non-distro provided) Virtualbox with their VRDP active, which is RDP for the VM instance and not the VM OS itself, so can RDP to the VMs on the network much better than libvirt. So, it is good enough. VirtualBox is mainly for intensive labs or monkeying with NetBSD kernel development, which 99% of the time I'd do at home.
Some people love repairing old cars of a particular type and build a community around that interest. Likewise with OSes.
There are similar movements around energy tech, camera tech, cooking tech, and more.
For such a mindset, the joy of understanding the mechanism itself is the reward, not the practical end result.
Too bad but I also get the enthusiasm bit as I like OpenBSD's philosophy.
The default installation is good and the internals are easy to understand. It's not as complicated as Linux. The security etho is what brought me to OpenBSD and the simplicity and easy to understand how everything works made me love it even more.
The only reason why I haven't use it much after a few months is because I needed RStudio. I wanted to settle for tmux+vim workflow for R but I've been busy with other stuff.
I run OpenBSD on my refurbished T430, and have very similar experiences.
Glad you have moved on from Evernote to something local and parse-able!
The use of "gimped" is poor choice of words. It would be better if the author described specifically what fell short for them.
The following features are available:
serial console access to the virtual machines
tap(4) interfaces
per-VM user/group ownership
privilege separation
raw, qcow2 and qcow2-derived images
dumping and restoring of guest system memory
virtual switch management
pausing and unpausing VMs
graphics
snapshots
guest SMP support
hardware passthrough
live migration across hosts
live hardware change
If I can get reasonably decent graphics, sound, and webcam support (in order of importance), I'd be able to return to running OpenBSD on my work laptop (I'm currently unable to do so because there are a couple apps I use daily for work that don't run on OpenBSD).
I see this has been updated with a link to the FAQ. I'm a big believer in laying out problems as;
- What was expected
- What was tried
- What was the result
- Why the result differed from the expectation
What is the difference/error?
Heartbleed was famously possible even when using OpenSSL on OpenBSD because OpenSSL (if I understand right) used its own custom allocator instead of the system malloc, thus bypassing the various attack mitigations OpenBSD's malloc provides (and that would have prevented Heartbleed from affecting OpenBSD systems). This (among other instances of similar behavior) is what prompted the OpenBSD folks to fork OpenSSL into libressl.
However, the blog post mentions that "for them" performance isn't an issue. This should not be interpreted as performance being good. OpenBSD performance can only be described with data: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=8-linux-...
Even for something that the OpenBSD devs themselves are doing all the time, compiling stuff, OpenBSD is ~20x slower than Linux. 2x slower would be horrible. I really have no words to describe 20x slower performance. If you are a dev working with a compiled language, imagine a 20x perf hit on compile-times. Imagine having to patch LLVM/Clang on OpenBSD by recompiling it from source. "Apocalyptically horrible", "worst in class", do not even make justice for how slow OpenBSD is.
Despite the name, compilebench[0][1] seems to do a lot of non-compiling stuff. It appears to be more of a filesystem benchmark.
I don't think that's true. There's pkg_add and syspatch and those are preferred methods for upgrading your system. You can recompile things from source and I think that it's an awesome feature for hacker, who wants to tinker with sources of some package, but that's not the only way.
In a normal world, the article should read "I installed bsd, and just used my computer to do something useful."
I think in both cases, people could stand to pay a little bit of attention to what hardware they're using. A lot of people aren't used to this because their hardware comes with an OS that is ostensibly "certified" for it, in the way that bugs in the integration can sometimes be warranty claims. Those manufacturers pay attention to whether or not drivers are available for Windows to support the hardware they're shipping, but consumers experience it as "it just works".
I also posted about that I tried Linux (Ubuntu), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on the laptop before deciding on OpenBSD. It wasn't made out of stubbornness.
It was simply the right choice for me for that laptop. And I shared my experience getting it up to a state I was used to with my previous Linux workstation (that this laptop replaced).
(I also have installed OpenBSD before and found the whole process actually quite complicated and documentation insufficient. YMMV)
My experience or expectations others may not share. I didn't truly consider that when writing the blog post.
The stuff I complain about is probably less than 5% of the entire experience. So, almost all the time OpenBSD is out of my way and I go about doing what I did with a Linux workstation.
It is mostly web browser and terminals for me, with random apps here and there like gimp or something.
I'm learning kernel and assembly programming and penetration testing, so my use case probably differs from the average user experience, I'd guess.
I'm just a geek enjoying geeking out :)
I love the BSDs but for daily use on a laptop I would prefer macOS by far. How is failing to perfectly fulfill a niche it’s not designed for “what’s wrong” with OpenBSD?
"Speed is Stellar
The speed of the system is stellar. I feel like it is faster than the Linux and FreeBSD installations, but I don’t have proof of it. I suspect there is less bloat to weight things down and the hardware support for Thinkpads is super in OpenBSD."
One of the hallmarks of a good Operating System...
I am grateful for your kindness and hope you have a great time hacking away :)
fwiw, didn't mention anything at all that would make me budge from linux...
I'm just a geek playing around, ya know.