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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

I'm still looking, do you have recommendations?

The BSDs, OpenBSD in particular, are built for long-term. Any change is evaluated multiple times before being integrated. From the point of view of Linux they can seem outdated/old/lagging, but from their point of view they just work.

That's not true. Just because from the user perspective it seems not much is changing, there are tons of changes underneath. They don't guarantee user space stability like Linux does, so they can move faster (including upstreaming changes from ports). They only support the last 2 releases. Considering that there is a release every 6 months, that's 1 year of "LTS".

I love BSDs. I started my career with them. However, I don't think this long-term-sh view is actually conscious on their part. They simply have fewer people to work on new things so things lag a lot. It's more of a side effect.

This is a misconception. The "lag a lot" is very much debatable. For a lot of areas, specifically OpenBSD, is pushing the boundaries[1], not lagging behind. That's why they don't guarantee user space stability or even ABI stability inside the kernel, to move faster. Just check this recent case[2] about Linux is not enforcing IBT/BTI on its binaries and this being a known problem since 2001, while OpenBSD is solving this.

But again, people have different conceptions of lagging behind. Some people think not having a graphical installer is to "lag behind", when this is pretty much a design decision and not a problem of fewer people working on new things.

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html [2] https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230714121907

It's not about the installer (who even uses those anymore?), it's about features and power.

Linux has had a lot of work done to support complex features and scaling in a number of aspects, whereas OpenBSD has not. In fact, the insistence on security and keeping things conceptually simple, almost inevitably means they pass on some significant improvements. When you want pure power, OpenBSD is just not the best choice, for example; and the virtualization stack is very primitive.

OpenBSD rather notably and explicitly lacks any notion of "LTS" (all releases are unsupported after a year) and is perfectly happy to break things without much of a grace period (prime example being the switch to a 64-bit time_t for all platforms).

That said, the upgrade process (like most things) is thoroughly documented every release, and a given release will continue to chug along for years, so I can see where you're coming from there.

They guarantee even less stability than Linux, what are you talking about ?

Windows' legendary backward compatibility.

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