https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png
Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse.
Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.
Meanwhile OpenBSD running all the default network services like sshd and smtpd uses < 32 MB RAM and that's with full ksh and real tools. That doesn't happen by accident.
I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.
Honestly I've never owned any other laptops than thinkpads and macbooks. Every other laptop I've ever touched in a computer shop left me with "eww".
Even my Steam Deck, with it's top down firmware and OS development regularly fails to suspend our freezes on resume.
I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.
They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat.
Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support.
I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.
I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server".
The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor!
Memory leak galore.
This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1]
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc.
NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).
I did a thing. :-)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brynet_openbsd-activity-73074...
I wonder how useful this will be for the modest but still multicore systems used for firewalls.
It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
[1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine...
[2]: https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/
nice overview article btw
backdoors in the supply chain are always hard to avoid but if it can't even protect against third-party attackers including any of the hardware attached what's the point
I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.
Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.
It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.
The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.
It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
mwambua•3h ago