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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD for laptops, VM guests, and VPSs. It has a very coherent userland, and the devs dogfood heavily, my go-to for anything I have to actually administer.

FreeBSD for servers and NAS, desktop. FreeBSD has high performance all around, ZFS, jails, bhyve, linux compatability, etc. But it's not as nice to administer as OpenBSD. I want to love it, but it's tedious.

NetBSD is an OK choice for anything, and very capable, but doesn't stand out for anything other than portability. If you enjoy hacking on things, you might find a lot of use in it.

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Openbsd has consistently scored towards the bottom in all performance benchmarks that I've seen in the last few years, when compared to FreeBSD and various linuxen.

I would personally never use it for a laptop.

Scores are one thing, using it is another.

I ran OpenBSD on a Thinkpad T450 for over a year, but recently switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, not because of lack of speed, but some missing applications and blutooth support.

Given I don't run a heavy desktop environment, rather just StumpWM, but still I did not in any way feel OpenBSD was slower than Linux, using the same applications.

OpenSUSE is the most solid Linux I have used so far, but OpenBSD was more to my liking setting up and maintaining. It is well thought out, simple, and... just makes sense.

>Scores are one thing, using it is another.

Indeed but I ran it on my Thinkpad and it was a sluggish mess.

When I ran it on my X200 it was simply unusable with GNOME, which isn’t giving it a fair shot yes, but it’s fine with GNOME on Trisquel and Arch.

OpenBSD has way better ACPI, power management, and less setup hassle than FreeBSD, and way cleaner and nicer out of the box than any linux distro. You don't generally have to hack on anything to get basic laptop functionality working, and the small loss of performance from mitigations, disabling SMT, etc. is really not as big a deal for me, because my laptop is used for ssh and web browsing, not compiling huge projects or playing games.

Even using it for web browsing, I found that Firefox was much slower on OpenBSD than it was on either Linux or Windows on the same hardware.

It depends on where you fall in trade-offs. OpenBSD also tend to be proactive in security and will choose security over performance enhancements. FreeBSD aims for performance. If you need a super performant desktop that is running a BSD flavor, FreeBSD is the choice. If your focus is having a secure desktop, OpenBSD is probably more up your alley. It is the age old question, you want speed, quality and quantity, but you can only choose 2, so which 2? Neither is a lesser system, they just have different priorities. For BSD, I have a preference for NetBSD, mostly because I value portability. I can take pksgrc and use it on my MacOS machine or my Linux box.

If you cared about actual security, you would use it in a laptop thanks to bioctl and full disk encryption.

OpenBSD is not really as secure as people make it out to be: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html

And plenty of other OSes have FDE and everything in-between.

Really good to see hardenedbsd is being mentioned, thanks for the link.

I don't think OpenBSD's reputation for security is warranted. Their vaunted claims of only two remote holes in the default install is useless because if you're using it for a daily driver you're going well beyond the default install.

I would have to agree with with your assessment, referencing the link in the above tree and this isopenbsdsecu.re .

Not to imply I don’t like OpenBSD, I love their first class support of old architectures.

> OpenBSD for laptops

Only if you carefully pick your laptop hardware. I tried giving OpenBSD a spin as a daily driver on my XPS13 9343 and was plagued by issues:

1.) The network firmware is not included in the base OS. I had to download the firmware onto a USB storage device since the XPS doesn't have an ethernet port.

2.) 802.11ac isn't supported on my network card

3.) The login manager and window environment are unusable on a 4k screen. Trying to scale using xrandr --scale caused everything to appear fuzzy. I scoured the @misc mailing archives and could not find a suitable way to scale display without causing blur.

4.) Suspend/resume is broken and causes the kernel to panic.

5.) X.org doesn't use the inteldrm driver by default which causes choppy media playback

6.) OpenBSD puts memory limits on processes by default which causes memory hungry applications -- like web browsers -- to run choppy unless you change the memory limits.

None of these issues came up when using Ubuntu on my XPS 13. On Ubuntu it "just worked".

I haven’t used OpenBSD yet, but I found FreeBSD to be a total breeze to administer compared to Linux. You’ve gotten me very excited about OpenBSD…

I use NetBSD because I want the same OS on the things that I'm hacking on and on my development machine.

In the case of OpenBSD, it is more “drinking your own champagne” than “eating your own dog food.”

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