Seems like a lot of situational (“nuclear apocalypse”) roleplaying to say that OpenBSD has better manpages than Linux. With FreeBSD my experience has been that the manpages are about equally terse as Linux, but the Handbook makes the system a joy to read about and use. Are OpenBSD’s manpages that much better? xinit has the same manpage on OpenBSD as it does on Ubuntu. mail has a good manpage. Is there a good example of these differences between Linux and OpenBSD in a manpage? I’d love to see it.
OpenBSD was create for free men like you, enjoy it.
As you will notice above, some of the OpenBSD’s manpages are shorter than Linux’s (or GNU’s) ones—notably, awk(1) vs gawk(1).On the other hand, awk(1) links to script(7), what doesn’t have an equivalent (as far as I am concerned) on Linux.
However, in general, I tend to find the information I want on OpenBSD’s manpages way quicker than on Linux’s ones, and I usually find the explanation better.And the fact almost all of them have an examples’s section is very handy.
As a side effect of its readability, I tend to read OpenBSD’s manpage more often, and more thoroughly, than the I use(d) to do in other system (including other BSDs).
I wonder whether mdoc(7) is the reason OpenBSD’s manpages are so uniformly better than their equivalents.
P.S.: I linked to the Ubuntu’s manpages instead of the man7.org’s ones because man 1 ed in my (Ubuntu) system presents the same telegraphic manpage linked, while man7.org’s one is the POSIX Programmer’s Manual manpage, which isn’t even installed in my system.
I wonder whether mdoc(7) is the reason OpenBSD’s manpages are so uniformly better than their equivalents
Having somewhat recently switched to mdoc from classic/Linux man macros, it certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s dramatically better in every way. Semantic markup, built-in decent HTML output, tool-enforced uniformity, etc. It shows that it was built by people who actually think man pages are good.
I decided to go a little further and compare equivalent manpages which are introduced only for the OpenBSD and only for Linux, triggered by your comment about the manpage of xinit(1) being the same on OpenBSD and Linux—it is so because it is an “imported code” on both systems, so it makes sense it is the same in both operating systems. (The same happens, for example, for tmux(1)).
So, I compared OpenBSD’s ktrace(1) vs. Linux’s strace(1) and, in my opinion, it shows the good difference between those systems: those tools provide the same functionality, but the manpage of the latter is overwhelming and abstruse compared to the one of the former.
Thus, I think the manpages of OpenBSD is a great example of their KISS attitude, without sacrificing on completeness of information.
I’m not sure the degree to which it’s enforced, but OpenBSD used to refuse to merge any changes that affected an interface that didn’t come with updates to the man page. FreeBSD was never quite as aggressive, most Linux things don’t come close to either. For example, consider something like _umtx_op, which describes the FreeBSD futex analog. Compare this to the futex man page and you’ll notice two things: first, it’s a lot less detailed, second it has an example of a C wrapper around the system call that isn’t actually present in glibc or musl. OpenBSD’s futex man page isn’t that great - there are a bunch of corner cases that aren’t explicit.
Or kqueue vs epoll - the pages are a similar length, but I found the kqueue one was the only reference that I needed, whereas the epoll one had me searching Stack Overflow.
The real difference between *BSD and Linux is in the kernel APIs. For example, let’s look up how to do memory allocation in the kernel. FreeBSD has malloc(9), OpenBSD has malloc(9), both with a description of the APIs. The level of detail seems similar. Linux has no kmalloc man page.
Does the author have a list of rad-hard laptops they recommend? OpenBSD has dropped support for SPARC32 (LEON line). I guess you could start with macppc to use the RAD750, but at something like $20k per processor, that’s gonna be a spicy laptop. And that whole EMP thing.
Oof. Okay
well, this matches my experience, so okay, fine. Oof.
But you need internet to read this article to know what to do with OpenBsd
Seems like a lot of situational (“nuclear apocalypse”) roleplaying to say that OpenBSD has better manpages than Linux. With FreeBSD my experience has been that the manpages are about equally terse as Linux, but the Handbook makes the system a joy to read about and use. Are OpenBSD’s manpages that much better?
xinithas the same manpage on OpenBSD as it does on Ubuntu.mailhas a good manpage. Is there a good example of these differences between Linux and OpenBSD in a manpage? I’d love to see it.Lol
I find the OpenBSD’s manpages better written. Some of the examples I routinely consult (OpenBSD vs. Linux):
As you will notice above, some of the OpenBSD’s manpages are shorter than Linux’s (or GNU’s) ones—notably, awk(1) vs gawk(1).On the other hand, awk(1) links to script(7), what doesn’t have an equivalent (as far as I am concerned) on Linux.
However, in general, I tend to find the information I want on OpenBSD’s manpages way quicker than on Linux’s ones, and I usually find the explanation better.And the fact almost all of them have an examples’s section is very handy.
As a side effect of its readability, I tend to read OpenBSD’s manpage more often, and more thoroughly, than the I use(d) to do in other system (including other BSDs).
I wonder whether mdoc(7) is the reason OpenBSD’s manpages are so uniformly better than their equivalents.
P.S.: I linked to the Ubuntu’s manpages instead of the man7.org’s ones because
man 1 edin my (Ubuntu) system presents the same telegraphic manpage linked, while man7.org’s one is the POSIX Programmer’s Manual manpage, which isn’t even installed in my system.Having somewhat recently switched to mdoc from classic/Linux man macros, it certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s dramatically better in every way. Semantic markup, built-in decent HTML output, tool-enforced uniformity, etc. It shows that it was built by people who actually think man pages are good.
I decided to go a little further and compare equivalent manpages which are introduced only for the OpenBSD and only for Linux, triggered by your comment about the manpage of xinit(1) being the same on OpenBSD and Linux—it is so because it is an “imported code” on both systems, so it makes sense it is the same in both operating systems. (The same happens, for example, for tmux(1)).
So, I compared OpenBSD’s ktrace(1) vs. Linux’s strace(1) and, in my opinion, it shows the good difference between those systems: those tools provide the same functionality, but the manpage of the latter is overwhelming and abstruse compared to the one of the former.
Thus, I think the manpages of OpenBSD is a great example of their KISS attitude, without sacrificing on completeness of information.
I’m not sure the degree to which it’s enforced, but OpenBSD used to refuse to merge any changes that affected an interface that didn’t come with updates to the man page. FreeBSD was never quite as aggressive, most Linux things don’t come close to either. For example, consider something like _umtx_op, which describes the FreeBSD futex analog. Compare this to the futex man page and you’ll notice two things: first, it’s a lot less detailed, second it has an example of a C wrapper around the system call that isn’t actually present in glibc or musl. OpenBSD’s futex man page isn’t that great - there are a bunch of corner cases that aren’t explicit.
Or kqueue vs epoll - the pages are a similar length, but I found the
kqueueone was the only reference that I needed, whereas theepollone had me searching Stack Overflow.The real difference between *BSD and Linux is in the kernel APIs. For example, let’s look up how to do memory allocation in the kernel. FreeBSD has malloc(9), OpenBSD has malloc(9), both with a description of the APIs. The level of detail seems similar. Linux has no
kmallocman page.OpenBSD assumes too much hardware. In the event of apocalypse what you probably want is CollapseOS
Guix does this well too. The info manual is detailed/searchable, and available offline during install and when installed.
Does the author have a list of rad-hard laptops they recommend? OpenBSD has dropped support for SPARC32 (LEON line). I guess you could start with macppc to use the RAD750, but at something like $20k per processor, that’s gonna be a spicy laptop. And that whole EMP thing.