[DiggyJohnson]

I see so many more cryptic comments about their mailing list than actual description.

Anyone have a good resource to catch up?

In the meantime, I recommend my perspective to anyone who asks (nobody asks): separate the OS from the dev mailing list.

[atdrummond]

FWIW the comments about the mailing list are mostly euphemisms for Theo being perceived as an aggressive individual. While he is highly opinionated, he is so for strongly ideological reasons that have mostly benefited, rather than hurt, OpenBSD given its niche.

[na85]

>I see so many more cryptic comments about their mailing list than actual description.

It's just not a very friendly list, or at least it wasn't in days of yore when OpenBSD was relevant.

You have to realize that a lot of BSD enthusiasts are people who have let "being a *BSD user" subsume their whole identity and there's a lot of "Linux is for noobs"-style elitism.

[rollcat]

> You have to realize that a lot of BSD enthusiasts are people who have let "being a *BSD user" subsume their whole identity and there's a lot of "Linux is for noobs"-style elitism.

As someone using Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, and other OSs regularly, what I'm experiencing is perhaps less "elitism" on the BSD side, and more of: "hey, we're also here, it would be nice if you could consider us sometimes". The BSDs traditionally have different ways of doing some things, which are equally as valid, but e.g. OpenSSH considers the needs of Linux users, and provides sandboxing through seccomp[1] (which NB is quite an achievement to get right, contrast with pledge[2]).

[1]: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand... [2]: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand...

Meanwhile e.g. on the systemd or GNOME side of things, projects tend to act not only as if Linux was the only platform in existence, but almost as if any alternative or adjacent technologies had no right to co-exist either: e.g. when GNOME told SDL2 developers to link against GTK to draw native window borders under Wayland[3]; or as systemd continues to swallow every traditionally discrete UNIX service, such as cron or syslog, and tries to shove DBus into the kernel. This is a stance that I'd expect from Apple (who are shipping an opinionated but highly polished and desirable product), not an open source community, where value emerges from collaboration.

[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Of course there are plenty acts of both generosity and jackassery in all of these communities, however the picture you're trying to paint is a bit unfair.

[krageon]

> [...] an open source community, where value emerges from collaboration.

Poettering hates everything that he hasn't touched. This is well-known and why anyone that cares about Linux and what it stands for should not use any OS that is infected by his projects.

[HeckFeck]

Correct. The man isn't hiding anything. He once said: "The only patches we won't accept are those targeting BSD or Hurd".

Gnome 3 isn't worth the price of Systemd.

[Shared404]

> or at least it wasn't in days of yore when OpenBSD was relevant.

You do realize that a very _very_ large number of us here use OpenBSD code literally all day every day?

Who do you think wrote OpenSSH? Or do you remember Heartbleed, when everyone switched or thought about switching to LibreSSL?

Just because most of us don't run OpenBSD-the-OS very often doesn't mean we don't all frequently use it's code.

[_ofdw]

Re: relevance, I'm referring specifically to OpenBSD the OS. It has no real use case. It's a research OS at best. The performance is abysmal and "code correctness" or "cohesion" is worth its weight in gold from a practical standpoint, which is to say very little.

OpenBSD fans like to make a lot of hay about its vaunted security posture but in real-world use cases I have no doubt that properly configured and up to date FreeBSD, Linux or even Windows Server is just as secure as OpenBSD.

There are just vanishingly few reasons to use OpenBSD today.

[amatecha]

No real use case? I'm running it on multiple daily-driver machines as my personal computing OS. It works, and well. It's stable, reliable and everything works as expected and works as comprehensively-documented. I think there's more reason every day to use OpenBSD vs. all the other OSes you just mentioned. I've never seen such strict adherence to project goals/values than with this OS, and the resulting quality and correlating user experience is evident.

[_ofdw]

We'll have to agree to disagree on the UX part. I find the UX to be very poor compared to Fedora, for example. There's nothing OpenBSD does better than its competitors by enough of a degree to make up for its warts; it's not significantly more stable or reliable than FreeBSD or Debian.

The documentation does tend to be pretty good, but... honestly? I just don't find that to be a compelling reason to choose an operating system.

[amatecha]

hmmm.. I haven't used Fedora so I can't speak to the comparison, but I just found OpenBSD so straightforward and "plain", not particularly unusual in how it actually functions. It kinda feels like a cleanly designed UNIX variant and the onboarding is so well-documented I just found it so easy to get started.

I do feel quality documentation makes a huge difference. Navigating the broken-links craziness of FreeBSD documentation was just such a frustrating experience. And even on a "first-class-supported" system at the time, they omitted a KEY (IMO) piece of information that resulted in me being unable to even run the OS until I did hours of research on OpenFirmware and realized the missing piece in the process. I could see from online discussions that most people had completely given up on FreeBSD at the same point I reached.

Ah well, for me, I don't notice any "warts" of any sort with OpenBSD, so whatever problems other people have just don't affect me or aren't relevant to my use case(s). Such is the case for any OS, I think ppl should use what works for them. No use discounting an OS completely just because it doesn't work for your purposes :)

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>in real-world use cases I have no doubt that properly configured and up to date FreeBSD, Linux or even Windows Server is just as secure as OpenBSD.

wheeze Windows Server??!! This beggars belief.

[na85]

Want to know which operating system runs on military classified networks?

I'll give you a hint. It's not BSD.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

That worked out great:

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/worst-cyber-at...

[SoftTalker]

It can seem unfriendly but what it really is, is not very tolerant of people who have made no effort to solve their problems, or even provide relevant information.

[znpy]

It’s probably one of the reasons why it’s so irrelevant.

Whereas openbsd people kept that attitude, the gnu+linux people went above and beyond to help newbies. Help not only in fixing their stuff, but also in growing and learning.

And I don’t buy the “secure by default” marketing stunt. At best you’d have to put that in the context of an OS that does a limited number of things, and does them poorly (questionable ux, poor performances). Gnu+linux is secure enough, particularly so if you compare that with the incredible amount of things it can do.

[SoftTalker]

The other thing is that OpenBSD devs (well, leadership at least, from what I can tell) don't care who thinks they are "irrelevant." Popularity, number of users, etc. is not a goal. They develop the OS for themselves, and if others find it useful, they are welcome to use it.

[midislack]

So kind of like Mac and Windows users, but their smugness is warranted?