“It has great documentation” and “It’s not for beginners” are conflicting arguments.
I really wish that people would stop equating difficulty to level of experience.
The concise documentation that come with the BSDs makes them absolutely for beginners; OpenBSD is just not for people who refuse to read documentation and/or ask for help.
The kind of people who read my site include people who have never typed something on a computer before. Only clicked. (You can see someone in the comments asking if it will run Paintshop Pro and Microsoft Word.) So I had to scare them away.
But you’re right, I’m just an intermediate, no CS degree, never learned C or even Perl, and the OpenBSD man pages have taught me so much. And the basic base system turns out to be more useful than, say, Arch Linux (which I also used for years) that gives you nothing at all.
I’m in agreement here. In particular, I cringe when they recommend beginners to start with Ubuntu, or something else that very likely will break or require tweaking and has poor documentation. That’s setting them up for an exercise in frustration. This should be easy, they say, and the poor newbie runs into all sorts of issues and after desperate googling and digging of old and not-so-old forum posts, wikis, etcetra, he may or may not be led to a working copy-and-paste fix that doesn’t really teach anything. It’s a bitter experience, if you’re not among the lucky ones for whom everything Really Just Works and doesn’t break come next update.
What hardware are you running it on? I switched from Mac OS X to Debian 8.5 Jessie on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon and it was kind of a pain to set up because the graphics and wifi drivers didn’t support the hardware, so I had to upgrade the kernel to get newer drivers. Is OpenBSD also plagued with driver instability like Linux is?
“It has great documentation” and “It’s not for beginners” are conflicting arguments.
I really wish that people would stop equating difficulty to level of experience.
The concise documentation that come with the BSDs makes them absolutely for beginners; OpenBSD is just not for people who refuse to read documentation and/or ask for help.
Good point.
The kind of people who read my site include people who have never typed something on a computer before. Only clicked. (You can see someone in the comments asking if it will run Paintshop Pro and Microsoft Word.) So I had to scare them away.
But you’re right, I’m just an intermediate, no CS degree, never learned C or even Perl, and the OpenBSD man pages have taught me so much. And the basic base system turns out to be more useful than, say, Arch Linux (which I also used for years) that gives you nothing at all.
I’m in agreement here. In particular, I cringe when they recommend beginners to start with Ubuntu, or something else that very likely will break or require tweaking and has poor documentation. That’s setting them up for an exercise in frustration. This should be easy, they say, and the poor newbie runs into all sorts of issues and after desperate googling and digging of old and not-so-old forum posts, wikis, etcetra, he may or may not be led to a working copy-and-paste fix that doesn’t really teach anything. It’s a bitter experience, if you’re not among the lucky ones for whom everything Really Just Works and doesn’t break come next update.
ftp in OpenBSD works on https?
Cool, huh? No need for curl or wget just for that. http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/ftp.1
I like it; but, it seems so
cat -vthat I didn’t believe it!Hey, while you’re answering random questions: does OpenBSD protect against tar archives with root prefixes?
(Read: if your tar archive had a file with /usr/ in it, would your copy-paste be harmful?)
What hardware are you running it on? I switched from Mac OS X to Debian 8.5 Jessie on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon and it was kind of a pain to set up because the graphics and wifi drivers didn’t support the hardware, so I had to upgrade the kernel to get newer drivers. Is OpenBSD also plagued with driver instability like Linux is?
Well the iwm wireless driver still has some known issues but generally works fine. Several developers use x1 carbon machines.