What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (2021)

I don't want to re-iterate too much of it, but the gist was: "If Microsoft won't support DOS or Win16, why should the two part-time volunteers support it!?"

The OpenSSL team clearly did not have the time or budget to both maintain that many platforms and maintain the security of supported platforms.

If "some projects" or "some vendors" want to support esoteric platforms they can fork LibreSSL and add support at their own expense instead of at the expense of the larger community using SSL libraries at-scale on modern platforms for production workloads worth trillions of dollars to the economy.

I 100% agree with the BSD team's points and their approach, and whatever contrary argument you make has to also explain away Heartbleed, which was at the time the worst security vulnerability in history.

It's like arguing that: "Sure, the Wuhan Lab of Coronaviruses may have had some biosecurity lapses, but just because the world's biggest pandemic originated form there doesn't automatically mean those practices were a problem!"

(Or if you disagree with the lab-leak hypothesis, substitute unsanitary animal handling practices at the Wuhan Markets.)

  if (C) { do { /* THINGS */ } while (C); }

(Cutting out inline assembly for rotation operations is even more obviously dependent on the presence of a modern, heavyweight compiler, as only those have—or can afford—an explicit list of idiomatic AST templates they match against your code.)

There are a few potential "gotchas" and changing your login shell (or especially root's login shell) or any other defaults in the login or other base configurations are things that you learn to to do very deliberately after getting burned a few times.

I actually think it's good that you're sort of forced to keep up, but it's something you need to be aware of in case that isn't practical for your planned use.

For example if you get too far behind you'll find that sysupgrade doesn't work anymore, because it will only upgrade from one release to the next, and if you're more than two releases behind the "next" release might not be on the mirrors anymore. In that case you'll have to go hunting for it or just do a new install of the current release and then copy/update all your local config.

That can happen with Linux too, but typically not as quickly. With OpenBSD, if you're much more than a year behind, upgrading will become increasingly problematic.

What ports are you talking about? I'm using FreeBSD as my daily driver, never had a port core-dump due to this.

Yes, that happened. I was there. FreeBSD is great and we would have continued to use it, but as an aquisition, you can only push back on so much of the incumbent tech stack. Much of the team had experience at Yahoo and saw how hard it is for acquisitions to run in the same infrastructure if they're running a different OS, so we spent zero time asking to run FreeBSD at Facebook.

The hardware at Facebook was quite a bit different, so there was never an apples to apples comparison to say whether one OS (as tuned) was better than the other at the use case. They clearly both work, and I've got my opinions and other people have theirs, and that's fine.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_system_software

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbis_OS

I usually say to layman that they are different forks of unix from many years ago.

OpenBSD and Linux have a lot of the same tools to be sure but they are different enough that you have to learn them both if you are administering them.

I suspect you are correct because newest and greatest typically solve a problem, and that's the focus for the devs. the more senior devs I know take an "optimistic but cautious" approach, while less experienced devs/non-devs typically just see an answer to their particular problem and want to use it, as defending the use and the few broken instances is typically easier than solving the issue without the latest and greatest. and I can get that easily

admins probably like old and trusted because boring is exciting for them; for a few of the systems I admin, it's great to have a few on debian/bsd where they've proven that I don't need to babysit these systems; they're never fully out of the equation when troubleshooting, but it comes up rarely, and if worst comes to worst, a reboot on these systems is typically so fast and non-disruptive that it's an easy decision, which often helps and then the issue never returns. sure it's not good that I had to reboot, but a down time of 10 seconds while I boot and it never comes up again is appealing.

Meanwhile qt6 is under active use and development, so I'm much more likely to find help and bug fixes, and developer interest. And it's less likely to say, stop building because cmake deprecated some ancient feature, or uses some ancient and now incompatible library.

Nice things I want from a page that talk at length about obsd too but it seems I am wrong for wanting them.