> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
Summary: Basically, the development process for OpenBSD is the same as stomach acid. To survive this environment is an exercise in code correctness. I.E. It's designed to break things that aren't up to par. The end result is a platform that doesn't sacrifice stability and security (the two often are two sides of the same coin) for the sake of compatibility.
Yes it is bold by the user but I agree entirely.
I spent the best part of a decade running Solaris and Linux machines from 1998-2008. The Solaris kit was easy to keep running once you'd got over the initial configuration hell and was very stable. The Linux stuff however was nasty at best. From CIFS/SMB crashes taking out the VFS layer to drivers packing in to incorrect documentation to random hangups. That is across CentOS and Debian. They are not even remotely stable IMHO. Debian is far better than CentOS was but that still pales in comparison to even, dare I say it, Windows Server 2008.
As a sideline, I'd been using OpenBSD on a couple of test machines because it was interesting and I encountered entirely the opposite of the above. I threw it into production instead of a CentOS 5 box that we were retiring as a postfix/dovecot SMTP/IMAP box. The throughput is about 10-15%[1] less but my word the thing is a million times easier to administer and is absolutely bomb proof. Every configuration option, tool etc is entirely and perfectly documented. It is nothing but bliss. It just keeps ticking. We now have 3 hosts on it. The only missing bit is a decent OpenJDK port but the software guys are starting to use Python for a lot of stuff so that may be moot shortly anyway.
My metric for an operating system's reliability is if it goes wrong, how much crap do I have to deal with? Well I'm confident that if an OpenBSD host went down that I could have it back up, even if the internet connection was out and all I had was an OpenBSD CD. I can't say the same about anything else these days. Last time I lose an md raid on Linux, it took me a day to get it back due to nothing but crappy documentation and bugs even those it was a tested recovery strategy.
[1] The thing is a hefty HP Xeon box so this is background noise compared to the actual load.
Everything is more reliable. Not one crash yet. When I use Linux, I would have expected several by now.
Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults.
Everything is more consistent. For example, the ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with just ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and standardized.
The code is substantially better. Less macrotanium, better naming, more understandable.
There is clearly more attention to (and more expertise about) security. This is, of course, what OpenBSD is (rightfully) known for.
Also true with Linux, of course.
> Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults.
Same with Linux, at least in the distros I use.
> Everything is more consistent. For example, the ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with just ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and standardized.
"My way or the highway", in other words. Use the Only OpenBSD Toolkit or get out?
> The code is substantially better. Less macrotanium, better naming, more understandable.
Readability is subjective. Macros aren't inherently bad.
> There is clearly more attention to (and more expertise about) security. This is, of course, what OpenBSD is (rightfully) known for.
At the expense of everything else, it seems, including hardware support.