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OpenBSD 7.8

(cdn.openbsd.org)
282 points paulnpace | 2 comments | 22 Oct 25 02:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.454s | source
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dlevine ◴[22 Oct 25 06:02 UTC] No.45665373[source]▶
When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system.

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.

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Flamingoat ◴[22 Oct 25 06:18 UTC] No.45665455[source]▶
I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8.

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.

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somat ◴[22 Oct 25 07:19 UTC] No.45665827[source]▶
Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

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1. lproven ◴[23 Oct 25 11:57 UTC] No.45680829[source]▶
> the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

Very hard disagree.

It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.

I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.

It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.

I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.

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2. Flamingoat ◴[23 Oct 25 12:17 UTC] No.45680981[source]▶
Similar thing with the disk layout happened to me in a VM. I just did auto layout and one of the partitions were so small I couldn't install any other software. I ended up remaking the VM and just using two partitions for the entire disk IIRC.

They have gotten used to stuff like this and think is normal.

Debian has similar issues with making partitions too small. It makes the /boot partition so small that if you have more than a couple kernel images, you run out space. If you use the LUKS crypt with LVM, the suggest layout would have vg-root too small.