OpenBSD 6.8 released (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary) | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD 6.8 released (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary)

openbsd.org

148 pointsjob33 comments

Check out the release song!

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#68

I'm happy they haven't given up on release songs altogether. I can only imagine how much contributor time it takes to make them, but they are a wonderful bit of programmer culture.

As an occasional OpenBSD user since the early-ish days in the late 90s, this makes me feel old.

Congratulations on the release and for staying true to your vision all these years. OpenBSD still feels like an old friend from the moment I see that blue color on my console. Here’s to 25 more.

I still kind of miss the CD releases. I bought every release from 2.3 to somewhere in the 4.x series, and had them all in a closet until a few years ago. Unfortunately I got rid of them in a fit of cleaning.

I regret it now. Since then I’ve gotten back into OpenBSD as an occasional user on a random server here and there, and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6. I bought it specifically for OpenBSD and it works great.

Those old CD sets were cool. Many included extra art work, song lyrics, install instructions and would boot and install for several architectures.

These days I mostly just run current snapshots, so a release has little impact for me personally. But it’s always fun to see OpenBSD still moving forward after 25 years.

This reminds me of when you could order free Ubuntu CDs.

Still have one of those and one of OpenSolaris. That was great for testing, owning a physical object made it motivating to play with.

> Added support for set -o pipefail to ksh(1), potentially helping error checking.

I thought that that was a POSIX feature, and it was weird of OpenBSD's ksh to not have it, but apparently "-o pipefail" is not in POSIX[1]. Interesting!

Either way, congratulations to the OpenBSD team!

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt

The guy who founded and does a fair bit of the work. Interesting skim.

Interesting: Added wg(4), an in-kernel driver for WireGuard VPN communication.

Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23594707

Yup! Pretty exciting indeed. Now OpenBSD has first class support for WireGuard, out of the box. And all the usual tools such as wg(8) and wg-quick(8) work too.

Were those imported into the base system?

I ask because I see that the wireguard-tools package (which contained just those two binaries) still exists for 6.8.

Nope. Keep in mind you don't need those tools to use wg. Wg was integrated in such a way that you use it with the normal tools like ifconfig

When it was added to current, I've even sysupgraded to snapshot just to test it. The setup is very straightforward, clean and easy, just like OBSD in general

I wonder what's the current state of desktop on OpenBSD

The ps/2 mouse driver is now extremely stable!

Right, but it's unusable on Linux...like systemd and pulseaudio :)

I've used both on every machine I've owned since 2013. Both desktop, laptop and server without complaint

What issues have you had with them?

It was ironic...but with pulseaudio i had LOTS of problems.

BTW: Why Pulseaudio on a Server?

Network audio for piping music around the house with Ras Pi's

Ah..good point. And yes i know it's not a big problem today but that thing needed lots of years to mature.

Man i had to laugh so hard. Thank you.

That depends on what you do to be honest. Web, email, programming, spreedsheets, wordprocessing have been fine for over a decade. Heavy 3D stuff, not my first, second or third choice.

Gnome and KDE are in the ports tree and kept very up to date. Everything there basically works. Most supported hardware just works out of the box with very little tinkering.

Of course there is less hardware supported than Linux and support can lag a bit, since there are few people writing drivers. But modern Thinkpads work quite well.

All that said, I have found Gnome to feel a little slow on OpenBSD compared to running on on the same hardware on Linux. So on OpenBSD I mostly use dwm, which feels super fast.

Generally most everything you want can be found in the ports tree.

How is battery life and suspend/resume support for Thinkpads?

On my x260 it works perfectly fine. Battery life is the same as with Linux and about ~1hour less as with windows.

But i use just i3 and some tools.

This is my favorite release since 5.5, and is the codebase that finally pushed me to start running -current. Thank you OpenBSD developers!

2020 sucks and I feel so fortunate to WFH managing things that run on OpenBSD. If you're doing alright, please consider donating:

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

Time flies. I still remember starting with OpenBSD in early noughties, I think 3.5 and 3.6 in 2004, which seemed like a mature and exciting project at that time already; fast-forward 2020, and it's amazing how far we've come. Great to have been part of it, another 25 years now!

I have been using OpenBSD the past few months/weeks on less common architectures (loongson and macppc). It’s taught me a lot and will enjoy updating to the new release!

OpenBSD is a great project. The OpenBSD team isn't obsessed with pleasing everyone or getting mass adoption. They just focus on building a great OS for folks who appreciate that sort of thing. They know what they're about and that's why they've made it 25 years and will be doing their thing for another 25 years or more.

Does anyone know if the simpleaudio driver means there's now support for sound over HDMI?

Unrelated, this is an arm64 thing.

Thanks

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