[dlevine]

When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system.

I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.

Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.

[somat]

I love obsd A perhaps unjustified amount, but not because it's security, I like it... well it's hard to explain, it's a small understandable system, but it's not a minimal system, there are enough built in services to put any linux distro to shame but they are all small, well built, well documented services, the OS as a whole hits well above it's punching weight. I find obsd makes for perhaps the best unix desktop system, but I don't mean desktop how mac or windows or even the linux desktop environments mean desktop. It is far simpler than that, I mean unix command line, window manager only style desktop. There is something about it, something that I find hard to put into words, but may be best described as comfortable.

But honestly, despite all that it's mainly what you are used to. I tolerate linux, it is one of the good guys, fighting the good fight and all that. But I still find it a bewildering mess compared to obsd. I am sure a primary linux user feels the same way about obsd.

[Flamingoat]

I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8.

It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.

The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.

It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.

[somat]

Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

[Flamingoat]

> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.

[daneel_w]

>> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.

[Flamingoat]

> Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced.

To you it is. I installed on 3.8 and it was not straightforward. I used to go to university with a guy that used OpenBSD and he even said the installation at the time was straight forward. So it isn't just me.

I can't remember specifics as it was about 4-6 months. It was something to do with drive labelling IIRC, it was super confusing and I think I just ended up removing drives temporarily.

> you can always exit the installer and restart the process.

Nope. I tried that. It did not work.

> You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.

Again it wasn't that straight forward.

[daneel_w]

> Nope. I tried that. It did not work.

The installer is a plain *sh script. You simply ctrl+c to break out and return to the shell, then run "install" to start the script again. I can't see why you would end up with an installation medium containing a different installer than everyone else.

[temp0826]

> very little difference between one distro an another

These days the differences come down to systemd or no systemd. I joke that we should refer to it all as SystemD/Linux (akin to how "GNU/Linux" was used).

[Flamingoat]

I did the LFS build with SysV init scripts. I think there is a systemd version of LFS. LFS was a good learning exercise to see generally how everything was put together. I wouldn't want to manually manage all of this myself.

If you look at the LFS compile instructions for each package they are essentially the same as the PKGBUILDs scripts in Arch, I suspect it is similar with Gentoo, Void or any other similar Linux distro.

[ninjin]

It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.

[lproven]

> the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

Very hard disagree.

It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.

I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.

It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.

I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.

[Flamingoat]

Similar thing with the disk layout happened to me in a VM. I just did auto layout and one of the partitions were so small I couldn't install any other software. I ended up remaking the VM and just using two partitions for the entire disk IIRC.

They have gotten used to stuff like this and think is normal.

Debian has similar issues with making partitions too small. It makes the /boot partition so small that if you have more than a couple kernel images, you run out space. If you use the LUKS crypt with LVM, the suggest layout would have vg-root too small.

[assimpleaspossi]

>>The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.

For what it's worth, I've never been able to properly install Arch or Gentoo but I can install FreeBSD in 10 minutes.

[Flamingoat]

I haven't touched Gentoo in 20 years.

If you use archinstall as I said you can be up and running in 20 minutes on a fast connection. You literally just state what you want setup through a menu, make a hot drink and you have a working desktop. It is pretty hassle free in my experience.

I haven't tried the FreeBSD installer in a couple of years but I always find that I end up lost in the menus or something doesn't work correctly. Then I am kinda left faffing trying to get X working, ports or something else working. I couldn't set the desktop resolution properly and I suspect there was some magic flag I had set somewhere or install firmware.

I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.

[BSDobelix]

>I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.

And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff. However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD:

https://www.ghostbsd.org/

[Flamingoat]

> And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff.

I used to be an operating system enthusiast. I've tried them all at one time. I just have a job now (I have to use Windows at work) and I just not interested in faffing to get graphics working. The experience hasn't changed that much with FreeBSD in 20 years. Some might be okay with that, but I don't really want to have to spend 3 days getting a basic desktop environment behaving properly.

OpenBSD is better in this regard than FreeBSD, I've found.

> However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD: https://www.ghostbsd.org/

This is kinda like distro-hopping. I don't want to run some weird fork of the OS, because you will end up with a new set problems potentially. I don't use derivative distros for this very reason and only use mainline distros.

I don't understand why (I don't care for wanky reasons that often quoted) that there isn't a mechanism for me to quickly get up an running with a desktop. The situation hasn't changed in 20+ years. Whereas Linux (for all the faults that it has) has effectively had this problem solved for over a decade now.

[BSDobelix]

It's really a YOU problem, i have working X on all my machines, have a good day.

You do You and that's good, just use what you like.