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Comment by stepupmakeup | Hacker News Reader

This perfectly captures what a sales pitch is since it doesn't mention any of the negatives of OpenBSD.

That's true; however I can confirm the positives solene@ enumerated are all accurate.

I was using OpenBSD as a daily driver on my thinkpad for a year and a half. The motivations driving me to switch back to Linux were:

* slow -- can't use hyperthreading because of developers' security concerns with that technology.

* no Bluetooth support

* can't use Discord's electron app, meaning no screen share

* NTFS write support needs FUSE which is extremely slow. I worked around it by using exFAT which is fast

You can enable hyper-threading at runtime though.

  sysctl hw.smt=1

It didn't seem like it worked. I haven't tried it in a while though, so I could be mistaken.

I've been there too, although with NetBSD. Lack of proper virtualization and containerization subsystems eventually became a serious issue and I eventually moved back to Alpine.

Net/OpenBSD still mostly caters to the needs of hobbyists, I seldom see them in production (besides maybe network appliances).

Thank you for reminding me: I want to study OpenBSD's vmm and vmd virtualization tools, and getting Alpine to run thereon should be fun.

It was a fair amount of work but I was able to get it running. Fixing the clock drift was by far the hardest part -- I had to install a custom kernel module. Getting networking inside the VM was pretty difficult as well.

Email me at aaronm04{at}iforgotmy.name if you want help.

Containerization is overrated in the sense, that you can have it all for "free" with chroot in openbsd or jail in freebsd.

chroots have a filesystem namespace but miss user, process and network namespaces. Besides, the Docker registry is fairly convenient.

FreeBSD jails have those things.

Jails can use the Docker registry?

The nice thing with Dockerfiles and the Docker registry is how quickly I get a reproducible, stateless, isolated environment for any large, proprietary or foreign app I may need, without resorting to a VM or polluting my system. All it takes is an Ubuntu or CentOS base, pull the apps and its dependencies, throw it away when I'm done while keeping a lean Alpine system underneath.

Jails would require me to set things from scratch each time I need a new app, even for a short while. It's just impractical.

I'm considering Nix as a potential alternative, but it doesn't work on the BSDs yet. If you know a way to run "modern workloads" in a KISS, convenient, Unix-y way, please let me know.

BastilleBSD facilitates a lot of these things.

>I'm considering Nix as a potential alternative, but it doesn't work on the BSDs yet.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Nix

In Regards to registries:

My "builds" are also reproducible. Why? I run the same build and deploy script each time. Wow.

For me this all is old wine in new pipes. Cold coffee. Registries.

Aha... ? And? What do you want to achieve? That is the question.

NetBSD has nvmm. Qemu is quite fast as as result. I run many distros ontop of it. Plus Xen. My laptop has been running Xen with pv instances for app isolation. Never as fancy as Qubes though.

I'm pretty sure OpenBSD is (relatively) slow regardless of hyperthreading,

Agree about NTFS-3g, it's next to useless. I've read somewhere that some optimizations are not enabled on OpenBSD.

Still, I like it and use it on my laptop and servers. I'm 100% in line with the first point of TFA : learning OpenBSD is a good investment, you feel that you steadily build up an coherent understanding of the system.

It's getting better, but they still have an older SMP model based on a giant lock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_lock#BSD

It's pretty sweet in a server or for networking/edge network stuff, but I've never really bothered to use it as my desktop daily driver and it's all because of what you mentioned. Props to those who have the patience and will to do this though.

Yeah, I have a VPS that's been running OpenBSD since 2015 and it's been great.

Can't discord's web version share a screen? If not, why?

If the only issue with bt is sound, there are some usb dongles that are recognized as a sound card and do the bluetooth part outside of the OS. You have to trust the manufacturer though. If there are other requirements such as file sharing, they usually can be done easily another way.

I am not sure who and why would anyone using openbsd want to mount an ntfs filesystem on a regular basis to do large transfers.

> Can't discord's web version share a screen? If not, why?

IIRC the Discord webapp didn't have an option to share the screen. I only tried Firefox not Chrome.

> If the only issue with bt is sound, there are some usb dongles that are recognized as a sound card and do the bluetooth part outside of the OS. You have to trust the manufacturer though. If there are other requirements such as file sharing, they usually can be done easily another way.

True. I only have 2 USB ports on this laptop though, so it would have been an annoyance.

> I am not sure who and why would anyone using openbsd want to mount an ntfs filesystem on a regular basis to do large transfers.

My use case was copying video files to an NTFS flash drive. I'm not sure how common a problem it is for desktop/laptop users.

>* slow -- can't use hyperthreading because of developers' security concerns with that technology.

     sysctl hw.smt=1

At the bottom of the article he did mention a list of negatives. Sure it is non-comprehensive, but so is his list of positives.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-06-22-openbsd-selling-arg...

The first sentence of the page says the author is a woman.

BRB calling the police

;)

Oops, no kidding. Kinda embarrassing for a RTFA reply...

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