Say what you want about the benefits of systemd or the usefulness of other parts of what is now unavoidable with Linux, and I won't argue with many of them, but OpenBSD just feels like a *nix system is supposed to. `ps aux` is like 10 entries at first. `pf` makes so much sense. `man` pages are consistently incredible. The security/cryptography focus, managing services, pledge/unveil... so many things about it is just *chef's kiss*.
It's not and will probably never be a daily driver for me and it may not fit your use case for anything, but I highly recommend playing with it.
I love this part of OpenBSD so much. FreeBSD is very good as well on this front. Sometimes the terseness of the man pages gets to me, but it's all there.
I used OpenBSD as a daily driver way back, somewhere around v3.5, on a somewhat elderly Thinkpad. It was perfectly adequate. I still use it for various systems that I pretty much just set and forget. Extremely reliable, and pf is top tier.
I have CD distros from 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 in a drawer somewhere. I wish I bought more merch over the years:
https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html
This looks down atm; hopefully it will be up again soon:
We've become sterile; caricatures of ourselves so that we can adhere to the groupthink. It's refreshing to see people unashamed to be themselves, with all of their weird parts.
The Simps on AI
The Simpson AI?
And then the 3 eyes fish makes a reference to Blinky
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Cars_in_Every_Garage_an...
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.
I have not really formalized my thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to. It feels great to get the machine to generate a thing for you but it feels terrible to receive a thing from somebody that is machine generated.
The worse part is the paranoia, Now I am seeing "tells" of machine generated content, and it may or may not be. But I have already lost interest.
The real irony would be that it is a hand drawn image carefully animated to feel machine generated.
Especially when I see all the self-destructive goings-on in the world, based on senselessly divisive beliefs or just the power-seeking that generates them to divide and conquer.
I once met Ken Bering, "The Wheelchair Guy" whose foundation provided wheelchairs for people who could not afford them. The wheels weren't spiked, nor were they like a Seinfeld episode, where George donates a cheap wheelchair with poor brakes that sends its occupant down a steep hill.
Oh well.
It's rare to even see a "real" gif rather than webm or other optimised format, I don't know if that choice is part of the commentary or not.
They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.
The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :
ssh myopenbsdbox # log-in to your machine
doas sysupgrade # will log you out, go drink some coffee
ssh myopenbsdbox # log-in to the upgraded machine
doas sysmerge # (optional) solve merge conflicts of your cfg files
doas pkg_add -u # (optional) upgrade local packagesSince I maintain my own custom patch set under OpenBSD, this is also usually when I need to vendor in the new release and update all of my patches.
What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm
everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.
All of the "suckless" distributions beg to be patched.
The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.
# Fedora/RHEL
$ sudo dnf upgrade -y
# Debian/Ubuntu
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
# Arch Linux
$ sudo pacman -Syu
# Debian/Ubuntu
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.
That is still wrong.
The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.
So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.
The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.
It's a big job.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...
Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.
I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.
guix pull && guix system reconfigure
guix roll-back
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Upgrading-Gui...
I assume it's meant to represent the perspective of pro-AI people, but it's ambiguous.
Is the animation comically slow for anyone else?
it seems very much like social commentary.
SlopenBSD.
Disappointing OpenBSD is and all of software is descending into slop.
Don't care if it is satire or not.
Now they ship their own hypervisor in the base system.
But that’s just my interpretation.
Rhaadt and Stallman have something in common in that they have been vindicated in near biblical proportions, often far long after presenting their stance and having been casually derided for it.
There is today still no real mitigation for the side channel flaws collectively named Spectre flaws. A look at Jonathan Perry's work, adjacent to the side channel stuff, tells us that most modern CPUs still not end of life today are truly single-tenant.
When reading AWS' writing on side channel flaws, someone who skims that writing will leave with a different conclusion than someone who reads what AWS has shared in its entirety and reads it slowly.
The only truly effective way to isolate applications effectively, in a way accessible to people in average financial stature, is to put them on different CPUs (hello dual and quad socket server boards). Thanks to the prevalence of inexpensive ARM and Risc-V based single board computers, although this requires advanced skills with operating systems and relevant tooling this is practicable (as ugly as it is).
There are some new general purpose processors made from ISA that don't use any form of speculative execution. These may be undoing decades of bad-assumptions cruft. Those who deserve these processors won't wait for retail channels to deliver them.
The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.
I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.
GEFS: The File Shredder of the Future. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/
I'd recommend taking a look on forums to see what other folks are running. If it's a modern Lenovo with integrated graphics or an AMD GPU, it will be supported before others. OpenBSD folks tend to use Lenovos. My best recommendation is to pick a laptop that a core maintainer is using, unless you feel comfortable making your own patches. They have AMD GPU support via DRM from Linux. Intel graphics typically works alright.
OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases. Building Chromium or Firefox from source is... well, I have a 2012 laptop, so that's not something I am going to do. Regardless, you'd need to be pretty comfortable with applying OpenBSD specific patches to one of these browsers, which isn't always obvious, especially since they are moving targets.
If you're used to being on a rolling release Linux, this will be a bit disorienting. But, in my opinion, it's significantly more stable and better thought out.
Just to clarify here, security patches are backported to -stable. So it is not like you stick to the same browser release for six months.
Personally, I run www/firefox-esr. In part because the ESR moves more slowly in general and in part because it is maintained by someone working for Mozilla.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=ungoogled-chromium
To:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=firefox-esr
You will see that the Firefox patches are tagged for -release/-stable and the Chromium ones are not.
Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router.
Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.
Does anyone have benchmarks between 8.0 and previous releases in that department?
I don't know how many users of luna88k there are, I don't frequent anywhere near the same ecosystem they would, but have never seen one, So from my point of view it is one person making releases for himself and I love that dedication. I don't have, nor do I want a luna88k, but it great that it exists.
So as far as I can tell that is all it takes to have a published obsd port, one person willing to put the work in.
What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!
On servers I have changed providers so it never lasted as long but at work we upgraded ubuntu LTS at least twice on same hardware.
Before Fedora I had similar experience with slackware, freebsd, openbsd and ubuntu on my daily drivers.
The only upgrade that ever broke a system of mine was my own fault by not reading news on archlinux website and upgrading blindly right when they were doing the changes with /bin /usr/bin. But Arch is different, it is opinionated and not expected to be free of human homework.
I did just re do the heatsink compound, so hopefully it has many years left, but I worry about the fan.
This is table stakes. Debian has had this since, IIRC, 1999.
You may find setting the console to serial works around it (set tty com0 in /etc/boot.conf).
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/using.html
?If you have one of Apple's Intel Macintoshes with a T2 security chip, you may want to do a search with ChatGPT through one of the free portals out there to boot something "foreign" to what Apple's secure boot with the T2 security chip already recognizes.
When putting together rootfs on top of what others would consider to be "complicated", reaching for rEFInd when I should probably have run a small PXE server off a Pi did speed things up. rEFInd has been a good general purpose bootloader, simple tool.
In my aged existing familiarity with rEFInd, its docs may not spoon feed you the answer but if you know what you're looking for and what you want to do can be done, you'll find it.
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade80.html
tl;dr - doas sysupgrade, system updates itself and reboots, doas sysmerge, doas pkg_add -u.
> Added ECDSA support to the relayd(8) CA privsep engine.
These are really fantastic.
My guy.......
The loudmouths who think I'm wrong are simply not sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work. It's just pattern-matching and heuristics-based at that. The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's meh.
What does "like" mean to you here?
> "AI is unpredictable"
*thumbs up emoji*
Lol. Casually switching crypto implementation somewhere in the footnotes.
> * All: switch the fallback implementation of the ed25519 signature algorithm used when libcrypto is disabled from SUPERCOP ed25519 to libsodium. The libsodium implementation includes a number of strictness checks over the original reference implementation we have used to this point and a more ergonomic API.