OpenBSD Desktop
x61.ar
x61.ar
I use i3wm for the desktop (1024×768×80Hz on a CRT), urxvt for terminal, netsurf for browsing (no JS), leafpad for GUI editing, and VLC for streaming music.
For coding the CPU supports the latest versions of Go and Python3, but Node/TypeScript no longer works since it now requires SSE2.
It's surprisingly snappy and fun to use, I can even post to hn from here. :)
Screenshots:
All packages and dependencies are installed under /opt/.
The consistent pathing is the only sane way to manage tooling.
I could do what you said, but the apps are nicer than Linux ones. But I still care about data portability (it's trivial to export data in all the app I use) so it's more a want, not a need.
MacOS was the host and it was immediate boot into Debian VM and it was my main machine I used to dev every day.
Pros and cons: I switched to parallels vm software from virtualbox because it just seemed to run a LOT smoother which meant the machine ran dramatically cooler. I think this was due to the graphics driver - higher frame rates and no display glitches
I’m not a gamer but very occasionally I like to play older strategy games - this I did outside the Linux vm, since high performance graphics wasn’t good inside the vm as one would expect.
I allocated like 90% of the system RAM (machine was an Intel Mac with 64GB of ram) to the vm
Once inside the booted machine running full screen it felt native, I would forget I was in a vm
Bridged networking so other machines on my lan can ssh in,
Any other questions you have let me know!
That’s a lot of “ifs”, but that really should be quite a bit of memory.
In fact you can’t even really run Firefox or Chrome with a single light page on that, now. In one of the minimalist WebKit browsers, yes, but probably only 2-3 tabs and no webapps.
Also, try the new dillo fork.
With gopher, you have gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org as starting points to read news and blogs. Use either sacc or lynx.
> https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png
> https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png
> If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work.
Hmmm...
I'm not using a browser nor am I using curl.
I do not send a user-agent header.
Online reviews say to expect under two hours from the x395 running zoom in windows.
I assume stuff like suspend/resume, webcam and audio work, since it’s a daily-driver.
(My only other question is whether I can have vs code yet, but that’s not related to the laptop.)
Any electron app will be using a Linux build of the Chromium browser, whether this will run on a BSD variant will depend on how well any Linux emulation layer works, OpenBSD has removed their Linux emulation layer.
I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.
So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.
I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards).
But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway.
The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.
With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.
Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...
Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)
If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!
I really like those simple desktop environment where you have a good understanding of the machine you are using. I do use ranger as file manager, it is heavier than walk, but it is very capable and scriptable while staying quite simple.
Needless to say: when I'm on my wife's Ubuntu desktop, it feels very heavy compared to my very minimalistic Debian / Xorg / tiling WM.
It’s got that sense of actually knowing WTF your machine is doing that’s so hard to come by these days, but isn’t masochistically awkward to use (I ran Gentoo for a long time :-) )
If Macs ever go to shit, Void’s my current frontrunner for a Linux distro if I can’t get FreeBSD working ok on a laptop.
Plus you can also open a web browser if you want to goof around and comment on HN.
And you’ll even have X installed if somebody manages to find some use for non-terminal programs (unlikely but we should admit the possibility).
Plus there's the coolness points about doing this without X: https://ykonstant1.github.io/fbvoid.png
For games, I have had some success startx'ing some in their own X context.
Also, on games:
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon or kmsdrm depending on the case.
You keep picking lone distros that have tiny communities. If you use something Nice, it might actually be nice.
Feeling like you are judging Linux Desktop from some obscure view.
A Linux so small that I understand what everything’s doing is about the only kind I can tolerate. It’s too messy and janky for the hands-off “just works”. Always was, really, I just didn’t recognize how much time I was losing to it until I experienced not having that time-suck then tried to go back—death by a million cuts.
Last time I tried KDE in Fedora, I could make multiple apps crash just by attempting drag & drop onto them. JFC. A program crashes, like, maybe once a year in the world I’m used to. I’m not sure the average has even been that high.
That's not normal, common or at all representative of the distro or Linux on desktop in general.
I will note that I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten used to working around or working past problems without even noticing I was doing it, until I was no longer using graphical Linux regularly. I am 100% sure I’d have delivered a huge underestimate of the crap I was putting up with, had someone asked me before I switched. Only when trying to go back was it clear what I’d been doing.
You seem a but unreliable too, like you have an axe to grind.
No one else is running into these issues unless they are on debian-family.
I specifically find complex Linux distros very unpleasant. If they worked really well, that wouldn’t be the case. Simple ones where I know what each process ps outputs is doing, and where its config file lives, are… well, they don’t do as much automatically, obviously, so they’re not as nice as a Mac, but at least I can fix them when they act up without going on a damn odyssey.
However, if you use a desktop manager such as Xfce, the file manager (Thunar in this case) is built in and can be configured with traditional double window arrangement.
No, not really.
I have to laugh when I read blog posts about how people go to great strides to run a "minimal" and lean OS, to then only come to find out that 95% of what they do is in a web browser.
At that point, the OS doesn't even matter any more if it's all web/cloud-services.
Out of bounds memory access in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 120.0.6099.224 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page. (Chromium security severity: High)
Yes, many of these vulns are memory corruption and then remote code execution. So what? The attacker is still confined to the sandboxed process.
And why are you confident in sandboxing? Just like in real life, it is only a rudimentary defence.
Here is some more browser goodness
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/30/23982296/google-chrome-b...
Rest easy. Although I truly hope you are not in charge of anyone's IT sec
https://github.com/allpaca/chrome-sbx-db
Rest easy
Given this and that the process isolation also protects against meltdown/spectre type attacks, I think we can agree that this type of fine-grained sandboxing is a requirement for secure software, no?
However, next to no software is using fine-grained sandboxing. From the top of my head only qmail, djbdns and gatling come to mind, none of them are for end-users.
So what end-users software does actually approach or surpas browsers in this regard?
Not everybody is a javascript developer BTW
If you're implying OpenBSD is fast, it certainly is not.
It's actually one of the slowest "main stream" OS around.
OpenBSD doesn't really have any security stuff that impacts performance. They're claims to security are primarily based on reasonable default configs and auditing older code.
I do not run heavyweight stuff though, but that's with WiFi, cwm/dwm, Emacs, compilers (go, cc) and Chrome. I've had a bit of trouble with Firefox performance, so having to use Chrome has been my biggest hurdle.
git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters
doas cp privacy-haters/chromium/default /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh
doas chmod +x /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh
My suggestion is don't—or at least think deliberately and dispassionately about tradeoffs. UX latency really sucks.
(The painful thing is that almost none of it seems to be OpenBSD's fault—it's all the desktop applications that demand 10x more hardware resources than they legitimately need, and then degrade unacceptably when layers that actually should be less optimized, like OS things that have a safety & correctness tradeoff, do make that valid tradeoff...)
Why not FreeBSD or Linux for that use case? Chances are you'd get better "file cache" (and hence better latency/throughput)
“Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!”
Gnu/linux is the most audited os currently in use on this planet.
What version of NFS are you running, and are you disallowing the older versions?
How are you handling user accounts? LDAP, Samba PDC (which is also LDAP), something else?
Why is this a normal change? I thought it was only needed for routers?
But most of the reasoning behind what he lists as advantages or for using it can apply to Linux also.
Let's look at the points:
> It’s uncompromising. It’s not a people-pleaser or vendor-pleaser. Linux is in everything from Android phones to massive supercomputers, so has to include features for all of them. The OpenBSD developers say no to most things. Instead of trying to make it do more, they keep it focused on doing what it does with more security and reliability. It’s uncompromising. It’s not a people-pleaser or vendor-pleaser. Linux is in everything from Android phones to massive supercomputers, so has to include features for all of them. The OpenBSD developers say no to most things. Instead of trying to make it do more, they keep it focused on doing what it does with more security and reliability.
The Linux kernel can be compiled with everything disabled aside from what is strictly needed, and there are plenty of uncompromising distros. Saying "Linux has more choice and supports more things" isn't really a point against it, and therefore not a reason to use OpenBSD.
> They review and remove code as often as they add. If something is unused, unmaintained, or unnecessary, they’ll axe it. If it’s unwieldy, they’ll make a small simple replacement. For examples, see doas, OpenSMTPD, httpd, and LibreSSL. This is great for security, too. The more code, the more chance of a bug that could compromise your entire computer. The less code, the better. Each new release seems to be getting leaner by removing old cruft. No other operating system does that.
No other OS removes old cruft? I'm not even sure listing doas an example of a 'small simple replacement', when it was a hobby project of an OBSD developer to fix some personal issues. And actually modern Sudo was pretty much developed by a different OBSD developer. So an OBSD developer writing a replacement for a different OBSD developer's tool because it was too unwieldy isn't that great a point IMO.
> Great documentation is a top priority. The built-in man pages are amazing. So if you’re stuck on anything, searching the man pages on your own computer is going to give you a better answer than searching Google. (This makes it nicer to work offline, too.)
Plenty of other distros or projects have fantastic documentation to, just not in man pages. On some linux systems documentation will be in info pages rather than man pages, but these days I mostly read what I need in a browser. And I've never really run into an issue with a lack of documentation either when without internet or any of the distros I use. Specifically here Sivers is basically arguing that the man pages in particular are better, and well, many developers and systems have moved on from man pages.
> The installers are amazing. The initial installation takes like five minutes. Hit [Enter] to the defaults, make your username and password, and it’s ready to go. Then the software installer is ideal, too. Just pkg_info to search for something and pkg_add to install it in seconds. (Which also installs all of its documentation, too.)
I mean, it's just a basic installer, no different from NetBSD, Slackware or Alpines.
> Everything is rock-solid and just works. Hardware I couldn’t get working in Linux just works on a first try with OpenBSD. And because they don’t stay cutting-edge, keeping a cautious pace, it keeps working and doesn’t break. The whole system is carefully planned and consistent, instead of a hodge-podge of bits and pieces.
There are plenty of distros and if you like kernel forks that the exact same is true for.
> It’s all free and run by helpful volunteers. If you searched ports, but some application you need is missing or out of date, just contact the maintainer and offer some assistance or money to help get it updated or added. I’ve donated $3850 to the developers to help improve the OpenBSD port of Node.js, Elixir, Erlang, Anki, Ledger, and Qutebrowser.
And this is true for any FOSS OS.
Look, I like operating systems like OBSD....Slackware was my daily driver for many years, now I use alpine. I value lack of nonsense, lack of clutter and the ability to pretty much know every file on my system, every process, and know what it's doing - no obfuscation or bs. I get all of that, but none of the alleged strengths particular to OBSD that Sivers mentions are really convincing points. He could easily be running a similar OS and be just as happy, or happier since he would have much better performance.
You can make it work, and maybe it wouldn't be that much work for hobbyist users with specific and limited needs, but generally it's no where close to being the right tool for the job.
please don’t discourage people from trying things out for themselves.
OpenBSD is just minimal and clutter free, but it's not like there are not Linux distros with basically the exact same traits - Slackware, Void and Alpine are all incredibly comparable.
My only real point was that OBSD has much worse graphical performance because it isn't a priority. Most of the developers are probably the types that pride themselves on not using a GUI as though that was something impressive.
IMO, given two no-nonsense desktop operating systems, I think the one with significantly better graphical performance among other things like app support, makes far more sense.
It was a simple google search away...