“They review and remove code as often as they add. If something is unused, unmaintained, or unnecessary, they’ll axe it. If it’s unwieldy, they’ll make a small simple replacement.”
I used to point out the security benefits of less code. However, fewer people value such points about security vs other benefits. Good news is lean code has other immediately-recognizable benefits: it may run faster/lighter, be more reliable, easier to change (remove/fix/extend), have less documentation inconsistencies, and be more secure.
Potential benefits all over the place. Might as well highlight them all. :)
Hardware I couldn’t get working in Linux just works on a first try with OpenBSD.
To be fair, this is more of an exception than a rule… I for my part always had something missing or incomplete holding me back from really being able to use OpenBSD on a desktop comfortably. Servers are of course an entirely different question. But giving a wrong impression like this one here, could end up deterring people who are interested, but insecure.
I also thought hardware support was a known advantage of Linux due to its larger ecosystem, both in individual and corporate contributors. My impression was that OpenBSD would support less hardware but the drivers would be higher quality.
my experience has been the opposite - I’ve found that the hardware I’ve tried mostly works out of the box for me with OpenBSD - where as Linux has often been a complete pain, especially with older hardware.
I’ve had an X41 since new and it ran OpenBSD from day 1 - it initially dual-booted with windows. Some information can be found on my X41 page - you can see it’s old as it talks about configuring BlueTooth on my X41…
Same story for me. I’ve tried OpenBSD on a bunch of old-ish ThinkPads in the past and have had mixed experiences with hardware support. While a lot of things can be made to work after installing firmware and if you pick well supported (often older) hardware to begin with, it’s nowhere near as out-of-the-box complete or well supported as most mainstream Linux distributions.
I’m running OpenBSD 6.3-current on a second-hand T430s, and the only problem I had was needing a wired connection when first installing 6.2 back in October 2017 because the OS wanted to pull the wifi firmware after first boot. After that, it’s been such a smooth experience that I wouldn’t consider going back to Linux for any use case beside building a Microsoft-free gaming rig.
Out of curiously, what ThinkPad are you specifically talking about? Just last week I tried to install OpenBSD on my X41 (again) after the update from 6.2 to 6.3 had worked out so smoothly on my server, but I just couldn’t reestablish the comfortableness I enjoy with Void. I guess, I’d really have to force myself to set everything up properly, but I just don’t have the time (or the experience) for that.
Thanks @sivers for putting money into erlang and elixir, I had to build a prototype of an elixir project a few months ago and was able to do it fully in openbsd.
Unfortunately we decided to stay with node… (But since 6.2? 6.3? I switched to -current a bit before that I think, I can do all my node development in openbsd too!)
“They review and remove code as often as they add. If something is unused, unmaintained, or unnecessary, they’ll axe it. If it’s unwieldy, they’ll make a small simple replacement.”
I used to point out the security benefits of less code. However, fewer people value such points about security vs other benefits. Good news is lean code has other immediately-recognizable benefits: it may run faster/lighter, be more reliable, easier to change (remove/fix/extend), have less documentation inconsistencies, and be more secure.
Potential benefits all over the place. Might as well highlight them all. :)
To be fair, this is more of an exception than a rule… I for my part always had something missing or incomplete holding me back from really being able to use OpenBSD on a desktop comfortably. Servers are of course an entirely different question. But giving a wrong impression like this one here, could end up deterring people who are interested, but insecure.
I also thought hardware support was a known advantage of Linux due to its larger ecosystem, both in individual and corporate contributors. My impression was that OpenBSD would support less hardware but the drivers would be higher quality.
I think he meant that for hardware that was supported by both, he had an easier time getting it working on openbsd.
That makes more sense.
my experience has been the opposite - I’ve found that the hardware I’ve tried mostly works out of the box for me with OpenBSD - where as Linux has often been a complete pain, especially with older hardware.
I’ve had an X41 since new and it ran OpenBSD from day 1 - it initially dual-booted with windows. Some information can be found on my X41 page - you can see it’s old as it talks about configuring BlueTooth on my X41…
Same story for me. I’ve tried OpenBSD on a bunch of old-ish ThinkPads in the past and have had mixed experiences with hardware support. While a lot of things can be made to work after installing firmware and if you pick well supported (often older) hardware to begin with, it’s nowhere near as out-of-the-box complete or well supported as most mainstream Linux distributions.
I’m running OpenBSD 6.3-current on a second-hand T430s, and the only problem I had was needing a wired connection when first installing 6.2 back in October 2017 because the OS wanted to pull the wifi firmware after first boot. After that, it’s been such a smooth experience that I wouldn’t consider going back to Linux for any use case beside building a Microsoft-free gaming rig.
Out of curiously, what ThinkPad are you specifically talking about? Just last week I tried to install OpenBSD on my X41 (again) after the update from 6.2 to 6.3 had worked out so smoothly on my server, but I just couldn’t reestablish the comfortableness I enjoy with Void. I guess, I’d really have to force myself to set everything up properly, but I just don’t have the time (or the experience) for that.
The ThinkPad S1 Yoga (2014), and the X220 (2012), but I tried installing OpenBSD on them only when they were a couple years old.
Thanks @sivers for putting money into erlang and elixir, I had to build a prototype of an elixir project a few months ago and was able to do it fully in openbsd.
Unfortunately we decided to stay with node… (But since 6.2? 6.3? I switched to -current a bit before that I think, I can do all my node development in openbsd too!)