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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

"Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version."

How long will Cisco IOS continue to survive without a modern desktop version?

Even our most die-hard OpenBSD "everywhere" fanatics (and we have a number of them) don't run it as their Desktop OS, and have never suggested you should. OpenBSD is a server/router/network service OS.

OpenBSD has found it's sweet spot. It owns the market for stable, well defined, well documented, consistent, x86 Firewalls and secure servers. People need to realize that trying to shove OpenBSD onto the desktop is the ultimate case of square peg/round hole.

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Fair point, but Cisco IOS is supported by a large company with deep pockets and a vested interest in its continued development. And, OpenBSD is far more complex than IOS; it has a much larger problem set to solve.

Also, I'm not arguing that OpenBSD needs to compete as a desktop OS. I agree that that is not its niche. But I am arguing that without a desktop presence, upstream support for OpenBSD will continue to diminish, and at some point that is going to seriously harm the project. Today, it's Gnome; imagine if tomorrow the Samba team decided that future versions of smbd would require systemd, and justified their decision by saying, "Well, it's not like the BSDs have been active on our mailing list." What does OpenBSD do then?

At what point does their niche become too small to sustain the project?

In 15 years of working in IT organizations at various companies I've seen hundreds of people run Solaris as their Desktop OS (mostly 1996-1998 at Netscape), various Macintosh System OS's and Irix as their desktop, at times everyone was running Linux as their Desktop OS, and nowadays OS X seems to be popular (obviously there has always been a lot of Windows Desktop Usage)

I have never, once, seen OpenBSD run as a Desktop OS. This despite working at several companies where OpenBSD was actually core to our entire infrastructure.

I'm not saying that nobody does (I expect the OpenBSD developers probably do), but I am strongly suggesting that OpenBSD needs no desktop presence whatsoever to be extraordinarily successful. I've never installed it on the desktop. I've never seen anybody install it on the desktop. Not once in 15 years. There is no rationale reason to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I'll go further and say I will likely never see X-Windows run on OpenBSD.

And, as for a niche - I consider OpenBSD to be the pre-eminent platform for Firewalling, IPsec, IPv6. Their continual focus on consistency makes the system a joy to use - all of the lessons I learned in 2001/2002 are almost 100% (hell, they might be 100%) applicable to managing an OpenBSD system today.

They may be a niche but it's a pretty darn big one.

With regards to your argument regarding "upstream" support - most of the upstream support required is around elements that are not associated with the desktop, and, in many areas, openBSD has just decided to rewrite the upstream contribuions in their own "OpenBSDsh" way anyways.

I'm confident they will do fine even if upstream support for desktop, and associated applications, no longer considers BSD as a first-rate platform.

Thanks. OP is misleading because it implies OpenBSD used to have a non-negligible share of the desktop.

> I'm not saying that nobody does

I did, once, for a year or so. It was around 2004, I think, and what caused me to transition was a slightly too big number of bugs in FreeBSD at the time. And not too good support for USB and sound, IIRC.

OpenBSD was stable like mountain, rock solid, ran xfce (my second favorite WM) without any problems and was even better documented and even tidier in it's design than FreeBSD. It supported all of my hardware at the time, the sound card was enabled by default and the ports were in much better shape than in FBSD - they actually compiled, every single one that I tried, while FBSD had quite a few broken ones. Overall, the experience was very good and I migrated back to FreeBSD much later than I was able to (ie. when all the issues were fixed) just because of this.

So no, I would say that this entire thread is missing the point - OpenBSD has a potential to be a good desktop OS, at least at one point in time it actually was a good desktop OS and it could benefit from being one once again (if it somehow ended not being one now, I don't know about present).

I hate Linux with it's numerous distributions with passion - any BSD is just so much more elegant, consistent, intuitive (probably I just got used to them) and clean - and I won't use Linux anymore (I did, for a few years back when Y2K bug was popular). For people like me FreeBSD is an obvious solution, but if it irritates me again I'll look in OpenBSD direction. I'd be very happy if it was ready to accept me as a desktop user then.

I run OpenBSD with a desktop on an iMac G4, mainly as a hobby machine to continuously loop through and display photo slideshows. But I take your point about its real role.

Oddly enough, I switched from NetBSD as when its iMac support for X was broken for several months, and I haven't switched back. (For the uninitiated, it's NetBSD that is supposed to be the one that runs on anything.)

I really like having it around to do things like experiment with pf, and test C development in a non-Linux environment. Especially for C for one who is used to Linux, it's a bit of fresh air on OpenBSD.

I also have a few VPSs around, including one with FreeBSD. I wish more of them offered the BSDs.

I agree whole heatedly with you about the quality of a obsd router/fw. I don't support enterprise networks so my viewpoint is a little different. Unlike ios and cisco hardware current OpenBSD releases are finicky with commodity hardware. I remember being able to pick any old box (486, ancient pizza box sparcstations) and being able to set up a OpenBSD firewall on it pre/post ipf debacle. Recently I have ran into a number of boxes that I could not get openbsd to boot on, most recently two older shuttle boxes. Hardware support is what really troubles me.

On a completely unrelated note I think too many people overlook the contributions of the OpenBSD development team when it comes to Openssh. On a much lesser scale they have also given a lot to the OSS community with OpenNTP. For clock synchronization you have the ntp reference implementation, openntp and Miroslav's chrony. For desktop machines the reference implementation leaves a lot to be desired (especially when it comes to power saving) and or is massive overkill for the problem at hand. Unfortunately chrony seems to be the only clock synch tool that is mindful of power saving and suspend/hibernation. OpenNTP synchs clocks with acceptable accuracy for common use cases without running a ton of code that only a few people fully understand.

And DragonFly's dntpd! It's time sync algorithms are actually pretty cool.

What does it do differently than chrony or the reference implementation?

> Even our most die-hard OpenBSD "everywhere" fanatics (and we have a number of them) don't run it as their Desktop OS, and have never suggested you should. OpenBSD is a server/router/network service OS.

OpenBSD 4.9 had much more solid ACPI support than Ubuntu 11 on my Acer NAV50 netbook (Ubuntu will latch wireless network interfaces to off on wake-from-sleep half the time, among other things). I had to switch to Linux because Adobe will not port Flash to OpenBSD, and all the shiny plug-and-play stuff that comes by default with Lubuntu. OpenBSD ports was also really behind for things like Firefox. If OpenBSD had Flash, pulseaudio, Chrome with gtalk plugin and/or Skype, and good plug-and-play support for memory cards/USB sticks/external displays, it would be a perfectly fine desktop OS.

Funny enough, this is how I see and use Linux as well - as a server OS. I have little concern of its Desktop prominence.

It's also a great platform for C development/testing. Its really tight security configuration has a way of shaking out subtle memory bugs that go unnoticed on Linux or OSX.

I use OpenBSD as a desktop. It works just fine for me. I use Linux systems too.

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