[trolleibusov]

Ever wanted to try some BSD system in my daily usage and this post is a great motivation to actually try. Although there are still some questions:

1) what is the main difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD? I see, that OpenBSD provides a very minimalistic environment, which still, I think, will perfectly serve my daily workflow based on StumpWM+Emacs+Firefox. Does FreeBSD provide some more "cookies" in aspect of daily usage?

2) What is the state of RaspberryPi support in OpenBSD?

3) Is there some known big issues with video/wifi hardware in OpenBSD?

[notalaser]

> 1) what is the main difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

"Security" is the often-stated end goal, but in practice, it boils down to an emphasis on code correctness, maintenance, reliability, portability and sane defaults. Realistically, it's sometimes done at the cost of functionality, but I think it's a smart approach.

This isn't to say that FreeBSD emphasizes incorrect code, just that the OpenBSD team seems to be more inclined to not include (or yank out) code that's unmaintained or is of questionable quality, even if it does useful stuff.

Some of their ideas seems utopic at first (like the insistence of native, instead of cross-compiling), but they turn out to be annoyingly right in the end. My own attitude towards OpenBSD drifted from "what a bunch of loons" back when I was a Linux teenage fan, to "this is how you do computer stuff properly" as I grew up.

> perfectly serve my daily workflow based on StumpWM+Emacs+Firefox

My stack is pretty much similar, except I'm back to WindowMaker (me and tiling WMs had a fight and it didn't end well and we're not speaking anymore).

I don't write much Lisp anymore so I'm not up-to-date on what happened with the OpenBSD ports, but I think all major Common Lisp implementations run well on it (but if you want to run SBCL on 6.0, you'll have to watch out for the mandatory W^X). I don't know if it interests you, I figured you'd want to know if you also hack on StumpWM.

> 2) What is the state of RaspberryPi support in OpenBSD?

Nope.

> 3) Is there some known big issues with video/wifi hardware in OpenBSD?

Basically, if it says nVidia on it, it doesn't work. If it says ATI on it and it's not too bleeding-edge, it works great. I heard good things about Intel GPUs, but I haven't tried it.

[groovy2shoes]

My nVidia cards have always "worked" totally fine with OpenBSD. There isn't any 3D acceleration or anything like that, but running X has always worked fine for me with the open-source nv driver. Obviously it's not ideal, but I wouldn't call it a showstopper except for a small handful of potential use cases.

[0xcde4c3db]

> 1) what is the main difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

FreeBSD has more. More users, more developers, more features, more drivers, more ports, more money behind it, more settings to tweak, more bugs. By comparison, OpenBSD has a much bigger focus on cohesiveness, consistency, and sound defaults (e.g. custom kernel configs are discouraged/unsupported). I'd argue that OpenBSD has a more usable base system (including things like X11, doas, and tmux).

> 2) What is the state of RaspberryPi support in OpenBSD?

"Support" is nonexistent, but I think there have been a few changes in armv7 for Pi 2/3 and a couple developers are slowly working on it. Don't hold your breath.

> 3) Is there some known big issues with video/wifi hardware in OpenBSD?

The open-source Radeon drivers are pretty outdated at this point (I think the latest adapter with full acceleration support is something in the Radeon HD 7000 family), the Nouveau driver isn't ported, and there aren't proprietary drivers, so you don't really have the option of using a recent discrete GPU. Most effort goes into the Intel drivers (the developers use laptops a lot). 802.11n support is still pretty new and hasn't seen a huge amount of real-world validation yet. Drivers for n-capable hardware are older/better tested, but people have mostly run them in 802.11a/g modes.

[groovy2shoes]

> I'd argue that OpenBSD has a more usable base system (including things like X11, doas, and tmux).

Not to mention an actually pleasant /bin/sh (a modified version of pdksh; compare to FreeBSD's extremely minimal version of ash which is (sometimes) useful for running scripts and not much else).

[rmusial]

1) The main difference is in their approach to security. OpenBSD's primary focus is a complete, open source, BSD system with a focus on security. The way they attempt to and often succeed at achieving that goal is through "code correctness" and emphasizing the use of integrated cryptography. That isn't to say FreeBSD is insecure, it just isn't their primary focus.

2) I'll let Theo answer that... http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=132788027403910&w=2

3) Not "big issues". But since OpenBSD doesn't sign NDAs to get firmware or drivers, and since they like to rework any software that isn't up to their standards, they do lag behind in hardware support. A good way to check if what you have is supported is to read their release notes. For example https://www.openbsd.org/60.html has a list under "improved hardware support".

[trolleibusov]

Didn't get which history Theo is referencing in the message. Could you link to some more context?

[groovy2shoes]

The OpenBSD project has never accepted binary blobs into the system. So, unless firmware is open-source, it's not going into OpenBSD. Note that the Raspberry Pi's firmware consists of a binary blob (iirc, there are a couple of other binary blobs needed, too, as drivers).