I've used OpenBSD the last year or so (as a bastion/jump host for a few systems) after using *BSD systems very little for probably the past decade, and... good lord I love it so much.
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.
Forget the artwork and check out the accompanying song and lyrics for the new release.
I think it's one of the funnier ones so far.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
To me that cringiness is oh so wonderful. Everyone is so weirdly afraid of their image, of how others think of them.
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.
Real stupidity is still available, you just have to opt in. Yesterday I spent an evening writing Game of Life in Prolog for no good reason, and it gave me 941 live cells instead of 18,885 because my neighbour rule counted diagonals twice. Finding that bug by hand was more fun than anything an agent did for me that day. The pointless tinkering didn't go away, we just have to choose it now.
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss;
You are not supposed to, it is intended to represent(and probably is) a machine generated image.
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.
I mainly don't like the self-destructive aspect. Even if it's a spoof.
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.
> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.
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 packages
> 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.
The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.
For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.
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.
Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.
I don’t think the theme is “anti‐AI.” I think what it’s trying to express is something along the lines of “take responsibility for your code,” where one’s code is the code one unleashes upon the world.
Even Xen (VM used by Qubes) periodically has CVEs, although they don’t always affect Qubes due to additional layers of defense and/or limited hardware targets.
I've used OpenBSD as a laptop daily driver for nearly 20 years. It's small. It remains mostly consistent between updates. In fact, it's so stable that I barely notice changes when I upgrade until I go hunting for them.
The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.
Is it possible to get a modern filesystem with openbsd or are they still stuck in the past? Also, is it possible to run openbsd without jumping through hoops on a laptop from 2025 including suspend, graphics, web browser?
I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.
By default, OpenBSD uses FFS / FFS2. There is an effort in place to port GeFS (from 9front) to OpenBSD. It's unlikely that ZFS will be ported to OpenBSD, due to licensing incompatibilities. For the same reason, btrfs is also unlikely. That's why I run FreeBSD on my big server, and OpenBSD on my laptop and other edge devices. I don't really have any issues running FFS on a laptop; it seems overkill to run anything more advanced than that.
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.
> 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.
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.
Excellent answer. Thank you very much. I will keep this in mind when the next life cycling of my current laptop happens. I will keep an eye on the core teams laptop experiments as well if there's anything about that available. Will search the mailinglists.
OpenBSD usually has far fewer hoops than Linux on laptops - IME, either it works or it doesn't. Pretty much any x86 machine that isn't bleeding edge is going to work.
Does the version number going from v7.X->v8.0 mean that this is a larger update than v7.8->v7.9, or does the numbering just automatically roll over to the next major version when it reaches vX.9?
By that point medicine will be sufficiently advanced that we can graft new fingers on him, obviously. That'll also make him more productive, given he's an emacs user.
I run -current these days on most desktops. What I can say is that since 7.9, I have experienced smoother audio playback and system load overall on my decade-old laptop. So, it is likely that others will experience similar things when moving to 8.0.
Phoronix do test BSDs from time to time. But for different reasons I think OpenBSd missed twice. I hope to see the performance gap being close enough we can stop thinking it is very slow.
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!
I agree that it's great but as an anecdote, I have an arch linux laptop i upgrade 1-2 times a year and it still works too, been that way since 2019 so went through major kernel upgrades without a hitch. Only thing that ever broke were nvidia drivers sometimes because it's an shudders OPTIMUS laptop. Last time I updated it, vibe coding wasn't widespread yet so I am wondering if new package versions will finally kill it if I were to upgrade it now
I like OpenBSD, but I don't think this is a specific reason to appreciate it as any decent OS these days has been upgradeable release upon release safely for more than 2 decades, regardless if it is a linux distro, an Open/Net/FreeBSD system, a macOS or Windows system.
That's pushing the timelines a bit. I had more than one early Ubuntu completely hose itself on dist-upgrade pre 16.04, despite it being based on Debian for which such things have never been a problem for me. Until 22.04->24.04 my rule was always to reinstall as a result.
I have an old(mutters to self don't look at date then I will feel old... Oh god it's from 2012) lenovo laptop that is my daily driver for portable ops. I run openbsd on it and... well it's perfect. sleeps perfectly, radio works well, I understand the OS. I will be very sad when it dies.
I did just re do the heatsink compound, so hopefully it has many years left, but I worry about the fan.
>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!
This is table stakes. Debian has had this since, IIRC, 1999.
The upgrade from 7.9 to 8.0 went completely smooth on a bastion host I have running with openbsd; from start to finish it took about ten minutes. Kudos to the team!
Good job and much clearer release notes than the ones I was reading about recent Linux release by the way.. much more informative and better organised to understand the impact in practical terms. #BSD_hellyeah
I find it quite annoying that I have to have a monitor plugged in for the upgrade to work.
Otherwise it reboots into the old version after downloading.
Is this a common problem?
When I read the Changelog I had to check if it was April Fools day. Is this a real OpenBSD release? Feels early. Also, many of those changes don't sound like real OpenBSD changes.
Thank you. Was just wondering because the items in the Changelog look.... LLMish. Not something I'd have expected from OpenBSD. On the other hand, it looks like they've done a bunch of improvements I'd have assumed they'd done years ago. I wouldn't blame them.
like a virus, slop will infect the techsphere, and it will become a real pain in the bollocks to siftt thru the mountains of semi-slop just to get to the real, reliable and human-made stuff.
I'm smoking natural gas to move the turbine that generates electricity so an overpriced GPU filled up with overpriced memory can give an interesting answer to this post :)
Humans make predictable mistakes, AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Hallucination occurs where you least expected for ANY reason. Can you say the same about humans? Unless the human in question is mentally ill.
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.
> * 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.
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.
https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike-s.gif
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...
relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
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 :
Since 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.
The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.
The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.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.
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.
https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html
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.
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.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260918115729
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.
Does anyone have benchmarks between 8.0 and previous releases in that department?
http://bluhm.genua.de/test.html
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!
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.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade80.html
tl;dr - doas sysupgrade, system updates itself and reboots, doas sysmerge, doas pkg_add -u.
You may find setting the console to serial works around it (set tty com0 in /etc/boot.conf).
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.