stutstev
The Lazy Gardener@stutstev
Why BSD over Linux? I'm not sure I understand the differences.
@Mandraulic What attracts me to #OpenBSD is its elegance. It's lightweight; it's simple by default and to configure; there is a great emphasis on documentation, which happens to be beautifully comprehensive, concise and helpful; and the developers behind the project are very competent. They write efficient software with security and privacy in mind.
@Mandraulic I love the Linux sphere and don't have anything against it. I just really love what I'm seeing from the OpenBSD team.
samurro@stutstev its a false prophecy. #openbsd is for people which are interested in the internal working of their operating system, the focus on security comes with its caveats in terms of performance. No desktop user needs this kind of security, privacy should be much more of a concern and there are better alternatives for that in the linux ecosystem.
@samurro I mean, it goes without saying that I too prefer to delve into an operating system to configure it to my liking. That's where OpenBSD's comprehensive documentation comes into play. In terms of privacy, how you configure and use your operating system transcends what you're using as an operating system (commercial offerings aside).
Morgan Aldridge@samurro @stutstev While I do agree that #OpenBSD is built by and for developers, I disagree that desktop users don't need the kind of security it provides. Privacy is absolutely important, but OpenBSD is very much the test bed for security features that ultimately other OSes adopt because they turn out to be absolutely necessary. It works very well for desktop & notebook workstations, though it's not for everybody.
@morgant @stutstev I disagree that it works "very well..". To be fair, I used OpenBSD 4 years ago. But if you want to have a "just works" system then there are better alternatives in the linux ecosystem. Even if you requirements are that low, that all you do is maybe using the browser and creating a text document every two months, there are distributions which solve that issue more efficient.
@stutstev @samurro Exactly, use the tools that work best for you. By "works well" I meant that it is stable, performant enough for my uses, and has the functionality & software I need. I tend to run significantly older hardware (currently a 2015 13in MacBook Air [i7], a 2013 Mac Pro, and several 2012 Mac mini [i7] servers), so I like a more minimal, lighter-weight OS.
I'm able to do web browsing/development, video conferencing, audio/podcasting, even some streaming to Twitch. Plenty for me.
@morgant @samurro Besides, a lightweight OS for the technically inclined is such a breath of fresh air in this post-smartphone age we're in. By using OpenBSD, we become largely immune to Silicon Valley's so-called "enshittification" that has greatly degraded the UX of Windows and Mac. The ongoing AI hype (with its security and privacy implications) is the latest example of this issue. I am happy to disassociate from the industry's nonsense.
Steven Rosenberg@stutstev I find my #OpenBSD workstations to be super stable (aside from the 2013 Mac Pro that I'm fighting GPU issues with, but that's not the OS's fault.) A journaling filesystem certainly saves headaches after a crash, but it doesn't really prevent data loss nor lessen the need for backups. So, as long as you have good, frequent, backups and the workstation isn't crashing frequently, there's not much downside to a non-journaling file system.
Russ SharekI restored an 8TB file system from a power outage last night with fsck. It took some time, but no unrecoverable errors.
Set up some decent backups in case the worst happens. :)
mirabilos@stutstev why?
There was a great writeup about why softupdates give the same safety guarantee as sync writes while being almost as fast as journalling (and with less writes, too).
@stutstev I've had a Fedora-OpenBSD dual-boot (using separate drives in the laptop) for about a year at this point, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.
It helps to have Linux experience -- especially from the days when things weren't so easy to configure, though a lot worked for me out of the box, and the OpenBSD documentation is very, very good.
I got a lot of help from some very knowledgeable people in the Fediverse, and that community makes running the OS by learning together even better.
I'm sure the #FreeBSD people in the Fediverse are just as helpful, and I really should give that system a try as a desktop — as well as on the #RaspberryPi.
With that in mind, maybe FreeBSD — with ZFS — is a better system for you.