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Comment by roboman | Hacker News Reader

I think OpenBSD is still more secure than FreeBSD

I somewhat agree with your statement but you should have explained further.

OpenBSD actively goes the extra mile in creating new security mitigations and ideas and the developers have always raised the difficulty of finding a 0day in the default install of OpenBSD. They are the creators of OpenSSH, kASLR, pledge(), W^X, etc and some of them are also the maintainers of LibreSSL.

You can still 'think' OpenBSD is more secure than FreeBSD, but I know it is still more secure.

It is, and also less useful

Untrue. It works better than most people give it credit for.

I run quite a lot of stuff on OpenBSD and it works for the most part fine. Sure if you are running Netflix or something at mega scale it probably won't be any good, but it works quite well for a lot of hosting scenarios.

I can make a pretty decent desktop OS as well.

I think it's strictly true that OpenBSD doesn't do as much as FreeBSD. You may well argue that it's sufficient, but the claim isn't untrue.

It can do the same stuff in a lot of cases. It won't scale as well but that is a different discussion. You can always find things another OS can't do.

Unproven that doing less is synonymous with less useful.

Eh, I am coding in C and Scheme rn under OpenBSD.

Iridium works, html5 video works, so do the videos under MPV. I've heard succesful stories from OpenBSD users with Vulkan under MESA. Even amdgpu works, but the -current release is better for that.

PPSSPP and some C# gaming works; so does N64, NES, SNES, PSX and even maybe DC emulation. A PS2 emulation is WIP, and it's not PCSX2. Then there is Dolphin, Nethack, ScummVM, lots of source ports...

You have LibreOffice if you want, among a lot of known ports https://openports.pl such as Python3, R, Node, and so on. No Netflix, but maybe with fake mobile UA's under Chromium you can override the DRM.

CWM+XClock+Xlock as my "DE". I don't need more.

FreeBSD does not have a focus on security[0]. Indeed, the defaults are notoriously insecure. There was a textfile floating around on how to bring it up to some standard but it eludes me. So it’s a low bar, but freebsd is great under low memory conditions, it has a rock solid filesystem baked in that is gold-supported, one of the best tracing tools known to mankind and very clear documentation.

That’s the power of freebsd. Not security.

[0]: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.html

(The referenced document is authored by an OpenBSD developer with points to score and an axe to grind; probably best to learn what lessons you can from it, but don't take it as some objective truth about the world.)

Flipside of the coin... https://isopenbsdsecu.re/

As I've said elsewhere, that document is a combination of useful tidbits, outdated information, and unactionable (and often incorrect) commentary. As long as you can identify the useful bits and ignore the rest it might help you.

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