[HN Gopher] Why use OpenBSD?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why use OpenBSD?
        
       Author : akagusu
       Score  : 126 points
       Date   : 2025-11-16 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tumfatig.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tumfatig.net)
        
       | detourdog wrote:
       | The list is missing the fact that the documentation is consistent
       | and centralized.
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | > is consistent and centralized
         | 
         | complete, useful, well written and contently at hand.
        
         | idoubtit wrote:
         | The post has many links to OpenBSD's man pages, FAQ and manual.
         | But I thought it was quite unsatisfying, even common tasks are
         | missing. Or at least I couldn't find them.
         | 
         | I had a test case in mind while reading the documentation:
         | running a custom web service with Nginx as a reverse-proxy. In
         | the documentation, I couldn't find anything about creating a
         | service. Are we supposed to write a frontend script (in ksh)
         | that accepts various arguments (ie start/reload/...)? And what
         | about the logs of this wrapper? And if I want an auto-restart
         | when my program crashes, I have to find another tool that will
         | wrap and monitor the process? I've done all this tedious work
         | in Linux long ago, and I'm not willing to do it again.
         | 
         | If the question was "Why OpenBSD instead of Linux", I don't
         | think documentation is a good argument. In fact, the only
         | strong response I've read is "to try something a bit different
         | and more niche".
        
           | detourdog wrote:
           | This is the page I was thinking of....
           | 
           | https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html
        
           | skydhash wrote:
           | The documentation you need is:
           | 
           | https://man.openbsd.org/intro.8
           | 
           | https://man.openbsd.org/rcctl
           | 
           | https://man.openbsd.org/rc.conf.local.8
           | 
           | https://man.openbsd.org/rc.d.8
        
       | brobdingnagians wrote:
       | Servers I setup in openbsd just keep working, and are an easy
       | patch/upgrade process. Servers I setup in Ubuntu break and have
       | weird patching issues. Maybe it's something I'm doing, but I sure
       | do like that OpenBSD seems a lot easier to just have solid and
       | work indefinitely.
        
         | shevy-java wrote:
         | Well - I would recommend using a better linux distribution than
         | Ubuntu.
         | 
         | I run just lighttpd these days; used to run httpd before they
         | decided the configuration must become even more complicated. I
         | don't have any issues with lighttpd (admittedly only few people
         | use it; most seem to now use nginx).
        
           | loloquwowndueo wrote:
           | And which distribution would that be?
        
             | igtztorrero wrote:
             | Debian
        
               | loloquwowndueo wrote:
               | I agree but you could have just said it :)
        
             | dokyun wrote:
             | Slackware
        
           | PunchyHamster wrote:
           | Ubuntu seems to have a trend of taking something that works
           | under Debian and somehow messing that up. Upgrades are one
           | thing but for a while we had separate instruction on how to
           | make Yubikey tokens work under each version of Ubuntu (we
           | used them as smartcards for SSH key auth), while Debian
           | instructions stayed the same...
           | 
           | Update was also hit and miss on user's desktop machines, for
           | a while ubuntu had a nasty habit of installing new kernel
           | upgrades... without removing old ones, which eventually made
           | boot run out of space and poor user usually had to give it to
           | helpdesk to fix.
           | 
           | Tho tbh most of the problems in any distro _with_ packages is
           | "an user installed 3rd party repo that don't have well
           | structured packages and it got messy".
        
           | graemep wrote:
           | I have used lighttpd in the past but have been using nginx
           | largely because I got used to it because other people chose
           | it.
           | 
           | Now in more of a position to pick for myself, and I wondered
           | how you feel about the pros and cons of lighttpd? I remember
           | quite liking its config at the time.
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | You are not....it's Ubuntu.
         | 
         | Not Linux, not Debian, Ubuntu.
         | 
         | Debian (provided you don't just dump a bunch of 3rd party
         | repos) just upgrades cleanly, we have hundreds of servers that
         | just run unattended-upgrade and get upgraded to new Debian
         | version every 2 years.
         | 
         | The few Ubuntus we had had more problems.
        
           | Guestmodinfo wrote:
           | How to upgrade Debian unattended if it's not a rolling
           | release
        
             | 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
             | Maybe they run Debian Testing. Testing and Unstable (sid)
             | are rolling, and the stable release cut from the testing
             | branch (through some process)
        
             | idoubtit wrote:
             | Not the Grand Poster, but we use the Debian package
             | "unattended-upgrades" to install security updates
             | automatically on our servers, and send an email if a reboot
             | is required to complete the process (kernel upgrade).
             | 
             | Unattended upgrades could be configured to install more
             | than the security release. Even with the stable release,
             | one can add the official APT source for the Debian
             | backports.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | Back to OpenBSD... realize that it has no "unattended
               | upgrades" capability. Until syspatch(8) appeared in 6.x
               | you had to download patches and rebuild kernel and
               | userland to get security fixes. Today, you could run
               | syspatch(8) in a cron job but that only covers the base
               | system. You'd need to handle any installed packages
               | separately. And only the current and immediately previous
               | release are supported at all. There are two releases a
               | year, so you have to upgrade every ~6 months to stay in
               | the support window.
               | 
               | Fortunately, with the introduction of the syspatch(8) and
               | sysupgrade(8) utilities this is much simpler than it used
               | to be. And, release numbers are just sequential with one
               | point number, i.e. 7.0 was just the next release after
               | 6.9, nothing more is implied by the "major" number
               | ticking up.
        
             | epakai wrote:
             | Debian still has security fixes, and point releases.
             | unattended-upgrades is the package that automates their
             | install.
             | 
             | I think you can also do unattended release upgrades by
             | using the 'stable' release alias in sources. That will
             | probably result in some stuff breaking since there will be
             | package and configuration churn.
        
           | Cockbrand wrote:
           | I used to have this Debian box (which was a PowerMac G4) in
           | my hallway. It had a 1000+ day uptime, back when this kind of
           | uptime was still cool, or at least I thought it was. At some
           | point it was two major versions behind, and I decided to
           | dist-upgrade it. To my amazement, the upgrade went
           | flawlessly, and the system booted without problems afterward.
           | Debian is just great like that.
        
       | shevy-java wrote:
       | I appreciate that OpenBSD sold its course on security-everywhere.
       | 
       | Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants.
       | There are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing,
       | or years before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux
       | outperformed their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick"
       | strategy. But one of the key issues I had was this:
       | 
       | I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I went out of my
       | apartment and returned hours later. Well, the FreeBSD machine was
       | no longer running; my linux machine on the other hand is running
       | non-stop for months, literally. This may be a fluke, perhaps the
       | computer had a problem - I am not saying this is really what the
       | BSDs are all about, as I also had them installed before. But then
       | I also asked myself "why would I want to bother with the BSDs, if
       | Linux simply runs better?". And I haven't found a good,
       | convincing answer to that for me to rationalise why I'd still be
       | using the BSDs. Note: I also use Linux in a non-standard way, e.
       | g. versioned AppDirs, but essentially Linux is simply more
       | flexible than the BSDs (that is my opinion) and there are more
       | users too. There will be always some BSD users, but to me they
       | are like a dying breed. They would need to market themselves as a
       | "runs outside the nerd bubble as well"; even Linux is still stuck
       | in its own nerd bubble. You have to break out of it if you want
       | to really dominate (Linux semi-does it indirectly, e. g. we can
       | count many smartphones as Linux-driven, but I am still using a
       | desktop computer system here, so to me this is what really
       | counts, even if the total number is less than the smartphone
       | users numbers).
        
         | prmoustache wrote:
         | What Linux has is mostly better hardware support and on gnome
         | and some distributions they have a software installation tool
         | that look like an app store but that's about it... Everything
         | else is pretty much the same, random people wouldn't figure out
         | a system is freebsd instead of Linux when running same desktop
         | (like plasma).
        
           | sekh60 wrote:
           | The license makes it very different philosophically.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | Which is what makes Linux kernel stand out, as we can see
             | by Sony and Apple contributions upstream.
             | 
             | Had BSD not been busy with AT&T lawsuit, all major UNIXes
             | would probably still be around, consuming whatever was
             | produced out of BSD like the networking code and OS IPC
             | improvements over AT&T UNIX.
             | 
             | Instead sponsoring Linux kernel became the plan B, as means
             | to reduce their UNIX development costs.
             | 
             | > Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by
             | Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape
             | Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market
             | 
             | -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
             | 
             | > 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle
             | announce their support for Linux.
             | 
             | -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
             | 
             | Ironically the major contributor to many GNU/Linux critical
             | components, Red-Hat, is now an IBM subsiduary, recouping
             | that investment beyond doing only Aix.
             | 
             | It is no accident that all FOSS OSes that came after Linux,
             | none of them has adopted GPL, as big corporations would
             | rather not be obliged by it.
        
               | GTP wrote:
               | Of course big corporations would rather not be obliged by
               | the GPL. But my feeling is that, if we give them the
               | option to grab the code without contributing back their
               | improvements, they would just do that. In the long run,
               | this risks harming the OSS community, as developers would
               | feel like big corps are being leeches and profiting out
               | of their work without giving anything back.
               | 
               | After all, the GPL forces to contribute back only if you
               | modify and distribute a modified version of the software
               | (the AGPL modified this point, to account for cloud
               | services). A corporation that isn't modifying GPL'd code
               | or isn't redistributing the modified binaries, doesn't
               | incur any additional burden for using a software
               | distributed under the GPL.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | It is no accident that Google has removed everything GPL
               | out of Android, falling short of the Linux kernel, and
               | they haven't done the final step with Fuchsia/Zircon
               | mostly due to what appears internal politics.
        
               | abenga wrote:
               | It is good for Google, not Android users.
        
         | kryptiskt wrote:
         | The NetBSD thing is becoming true again as Linux distros and
         | the kernel are lately on a tear of purging old and niche
         | architectures.
        
         | HumanOstrich wrote:
         | It was a fluke or a problem with the computer unless you can
         | provide more than 1 data point with more info than "it wasn't
         | running".
        
         | Guestmodinfo wrote:
         | Just a few hours ago on the irc channel of OpenBSD someone said
         | that OpenBSD is good at not letting a wonky hardware run
         | compared to linux. So you could use the dmesg and ask it in the
         | OpenBSD mailing list and they will point out which wonky
         | hardware is causing trouble and you can replace that
         | problematic part. I ran OpenBSD current for 6 years and never
         | faced such issue
        
           | hylaride wrote:
           | Years ago (circa ~2005) I was working for a company with a
           | mix of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux. I was more of a
           | fan of OpenBSD and I received a lot of grief when the OpenBSD
           | team suddenly ripped out support for one of the Dell hardware
           | RAID controllers (I don't remember which one, but IIRC it was
           | one based on something from Adaptec), claiming they couldn't
           | reliably reverse engineer it to create stable drivers. Their
           | attempts ultimately always ended up with "random" corruption.
           | 
           | A year or so later our main DB on Windows (long story on why
           | we were running windows DBs with most of the other kit being
           | BSD/Linux) had a total corruption incident (it was painful,
           | but we had a replica failover that we recovered from) - turns
           | out we could get an answer from Dell since Windows was
           | obviously supported by Dell themselves. There was a known
           | issue with that model of RAID controller that would result in
           | random and total corruption - and there was no way to fix it
           | in firmware.
           | 
           | I was smug about it, but had to concede that people should
           | still be given an informed choice. IIRC Dell was very quiet
           | about it, which is certainly not "informed choice". Had we
           | known, we'd have shelled out for different hardware for our
           | databases!
        
             | cyberpunk wrote:
             | Hangon on a second, you paid dell support and they
             | knowingly let you run production on kit with _known_ total
             | irreversible data loss bugs? Da. Fuq?!?
        
               | hylaride wrote:
               | To be fair, there was not much Dell could do as their
               | PERC cards were all rebranded Adaptec and later LSI.
               | Adaptec was the gold standard for ages, but I assume was
               | enshitified somewhere along the way. The long term result
               | was that the entire hardware raid world ditched Adaptec
               | for LSI and/or software RAID (eg ZFS). Dell (in those
               | days, not sure if it's still the case) had excellent
               | support. There was a bug on another server model where
               | the onboard video card would eventually fail and fry the
               | motherboard. Even years later out of support, Dell would
               | for free replace it if it failed with whatever new model
               | equivalent existed.
               | 
               | I left the company before things were totally resolved,
               | but I think dell ultimately gave people who complained
               | LSI cards, but it took awhile for those to be designed
               | and manufactured to fit the internal drive slot. Most
               | people who were also using external arrays moved to third
               | party ones or other hardware.
               | 
               | Some background from an OpenBSD dev:
               | 
               | https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Linux won't run on legacy machines the same way NetBSD does
         | today.
        
       | scatbot wrote:
       | One of the reasons why I'm using OpenBSD is because it passes
       | what I think of as a litmus test for FLOSS software: can I build
       | the whole thing from scratch, in a short time and with minimal
       | fuss? In the case of OpenBSD, the answer is yes. I can install it
       | on a new machine, fetch the source code from mirrors, do some
       | edits to the source, build a fresh release, write it to a USB
       | stick and boot it on another machine. On my machine, the whole
       | process takes about 10 minutes for the kernel, additional 20
       | minutes for base and maybe an hour if you add Xenocara. Compare
       | that to Linux distros like Ubuntu or Arch where building from
       | scratch is either discouraged or some fringe activity that
       | requires skimming through wiki articles, forum posts or old
       | Websites on the Wayback Machine.
        
         | sekh60 wrote:
         | Gentoo is a Linux rolling release built from source (just
         | recently they gave the option of using binary packages as
         | well). I've ran it on my desktop for years.
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | Buildroot does exactly that and it gives you big TUI menu to
         | pick what you want included in your linux image
        
           | Milpotel wrote:
           | There is also T2 SDE.
        
       | mono442 wrote:
       | To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system
       | myself other than just for the sake of using something different
       | and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but
       | nowadays Linux has caught up in features.
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | BSD license so you don't have to upstream your stuff would be
         | one. Tho it's not an advantage _to_ *BSD systems, Linux near-
         | forcing vendors to go mainline (as keeping separate kernel tree
         | is PITA) did a lot of good in hardware support.
        
           | graemep wrote:
           | Not really a problem for users. Only for people who want to
           | redistribute a fork. It matters if you are Apple or Sony, but
           | not for most people.
           | 
           | incidentally, the requirement of the GPL is not to upstream
           | your stuff, but to offer to make the modified source
           | available to anyone you distribute the code to. Often the
           | same in practice, but does not have to be.
        
         | Gualdrapo wrote:
         | I feel like DragonflyBSD is really cool if you want to look at
         | some BSD that offers some advantages and something unique to
         | your day-to-day desktop usage. And I feel like their community
         | is not as toxic as that of FreeBSD and OpenBSD with their
         | holier-than-thou attitude towards Linux.
         | 
         | I'd love it if Gentoo/BSD were a thing once again, I like the
         | BSD concepts but there's nothing like Portage on BSD so far -
         | afaik pkgsrc is nowhere close to it.
        
         | rixed wrote:
         | When I switched to FreeBSD, it was because of the quality of
         | the documentation. In Linux manpages are a patchwork from
         | various sources, and it shows; it's not rare for a manpage to
         | be missing, obsolete, or to document another similar tool, or
         | to be inacurrate... Much better than in many other OSes, but
         | still nowhere as good as in FreeBSD.
         | 
         | Now that I think of it, when I switched from DOS to Linux it
         | was already because I found manpages amazing. Maybe I've just a
         | soft spot for documentation.
        
         | rfmoz wrote:
         | The development move in ZFS from FreeBSD to OpenZFS (AKA Linux)
         | was a mayor point on that.
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | >To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system
         | myself
         | 
         | I see some reasons:
         | 
         | - the BSD license
         | 
         | - the system is composed of pieces written to work together, it
         | is built from start up as a coherent operating system as
         | opposed to things cobbled together like other UNIX-like OS-es
         | do
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | To me the advantages are: simpler and more consistent
         | configuration, less churn, better documentation, focus on
         | security and secure-by-default.
         | 
         | Yes if raw performance is your top priority, linux wins. But
         | for a desktop or general-purpose server, that's not the most
         | important thing for me.
        
       | hellcow wrote:
       | I built my last company on OpenBSD. It was easy to understand the
       | entire system, and secure-by-default (everything disabled) is the
       | right posture for servers. Pledge and unveil worked brilliantly
       | to restrict our Go processes to specific syscall sets and files.
       | The firewall on OpenBSD is miles better to configure than
       | iptables. I never had challenges upgrading them--they just kept
       | working for years.
        
         | thomashabets2 wrote:
         | Finally Linux has something that approaches pledge/unveil:
         | landlock.
         | 
         | Seccomp was never actually usable:
         | https://blog.habets.se/2022/03/seccomp-unsafe-at-any-speed.h...
        
           | shiomiru wrote:
           | > Seccomp was never actually usable
           | 
           | It's barely usable by itself but I don't think it's an
           | inherent problem of seccomp-bpf, rather the lack of libc
           | support. Surely the task of "determine which syscalls are
           | used for feature X" belongs in the software that decides
           | which syscalls to use for feature X.
           | 
           | In fact, Cosmopolitan libc implements pledge on Linux on top
           | of seccomp-bpf: https://justine.lol/pledge/
        
           | hulitu wrote:
           | Linux is far too bloated to ve run as a secure system and the
           | attack surface of any linux distro, due to the number of
           | kernel modules loaded by default, is very big.
        
         | jorvi wrote:
         | > I built my last company on OpenBSD. It was easy to understand
         | the entire system, and secure-by-default (everything disabled)
         | is the right posture for servers.
         | 
         | That really depends. You could argue a router is a server.
         | OpenWRT has the default of WiFi off for security, which means
         | that if the config is somehow hosed and you have to hard reset
         | the router, you now have an inaccessible brick unless you
         | happen to have a USB-Ethernet adapter on you.
         | 
         | Sensible defaults are much, much better than the absolutionist
         | approach of "disable everything".
         | 
         | Edit: it's so funny to know that all the people slamming the
         | downvote have never hit the brick wall of a dumb default. I
         | hope you stay blessed like that!
        
           | unethical_ban wrote:
           | You bring up a particular edge case as a way to discredit a
           | much more thorough essay on the system.
           | 
           | And if someone is administering routers but don't have the
           | hard-line equipment to configure them locally, I wish them
           | well.
        
           | DoctorOW wrote:
           | > _Edit: it 's so funny to know that all the people slamming
           | the downvote have never hit the brick wall of a dumb
           | default._
           | 
           | I'll bite. OpenBSD and OpenWRT are different things, and I'm
           | honestly surprised to hear that tech matters enough to you to
           | setup OpenWRT but not enough to own a desktop (or a laptop
           | that doesn't skimp on ports)
        
             | jorvi wrote:
             | They are, but Linux or BSD doesn't matter all that much
             | when it is about the meta case of deciding the defaults.
             | 
             | Funnily enough I feel a BSD is much more suited to modems /
             | routers, if it weren't for HW WiFi support. Yes, I know you
             | can separate your routing and your access point onto
             | different devices.
             | 
             | At any rate I'm just pointing out that that absolutionism
             | is rarely the right answer. It's also pretty telling that
             | people actually went through my comment history to downvote
             | a few unrelated recent comments. People get angry when they
             | have to adjust their assumptions.
             | 
             | As far as computing device goed, I prefer not lugging
             | around a plastic brick. And one is bound to either lose or
             | forget a dongle. In which case you get boned by OpenWRT's
             | dumb default.
             | 
             | The reason for that default is that if they set up an open
             | OpenWRT WiFi (or default passworded, think "OpenWRT2025"),
             | in that split 5 minute window before you change it, some
             | wardriver might login and mess with your network.
             | 
             | Obviously the chances of that are rather insignificant. And
             | they could generate a default password based on the
             | hardware. For the real security nuts they could tell them
             | to build an image without default-on WiFi (currently they
             | do the inverse).
        
         | sedawkgrep wrote:
         | > The firewall on OpenBSD is miles better to configure than
         | iptables.
         | 
         | That's understating the matter by a huge amount.
         | 
         | pf is easier to read and understand, easier to adjust, more
         | dynamic, and works like every other firewall in the world not
         | based on iptables.
        
           | tasn wrote:
           | iptables is indeed horrid, but Linux has nftables nowadays,
           | which is much nicer and easier to configure.
        
       | matt-p wrote:
       | I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is
       | still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run
       | it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian.
       | Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it
       | as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just
       | perfect).
        
         | dijit wrote:
         | there's a lot of optimisations they don't engage with because
         | it makes the code "ugly" but there's a larger one here, where
         | they disable hyperthreading outright due to side-channel
         | attacks.
         | 
         | Might be a leading cause of what you're seeing.
        
           | thelastgallon wrote:
           | So, spin up lots of single-core VMs?
        
             | dijit wrote:
             | for I/O intensive applications, it's always been true that
             | VMs are a decent chunk of overhead: https://sites.cc.gatech
             | .edu/systems/projects/Elba/pub/JackLi...
             | 
             | Also, it's likely already in a VM.
        
           | basscomm wrote:
           | > where they disable hyperthreading outright due to side-
           | channel attacks.
           | 
           | You can turn on hyperthreading if you need/want it:
           | https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#SMT
        
         | throwaway270925 wrote:
         | It's gotten a lot faster with 7.6 (lots of work on the TCP
         | stack iirc). We saw huge improvements in throughput after
         | updating.
         | 
         | The new 7.8 release should bring some more performance, haven't
         | tested it yet though.
        
           | SoftTalker wrote:
           | Yes, they've been working on unlocking more and more
           | performance over the 7.x series of releases if not longer.
           | 
           | Remember the BSDs date from an era when you only had one core
           | in the CPU.
        
         | finaard wrote:
         | It used to be faster than Linux for that, but that's been a
         | while ago.
         | 
         | I moved some stuff away from OpenBSD when the release of Linux
         | 2.4 implemented all missing firewall functionality - but kept
         | others still due to the early issues with the 2.4 kernel. But
         | by the time 2.5 was getting decent - roughly a year before the
         | 2.6 release - in most cases just using Linux with a custom 2.5
         | kernel was the better option.
        
       | lol_catz wrote:
       | If you can tolerate poor performance then by all means use
       | OpenBSD. Debian stable FTW.
        
         | ectospheno wrote:
         | You do have to buy more powerful hardware than you otherwise
         | would. I find it worth it to run code I can more easily
         | understand. I agree on Debian as well. My router and laptop are
         | OpenBSD but most vms on my proxmox are Debian.
        
           | hyperpl wrote:
           | Agreed. I run my OpenBSD firewall on my odroid h4 - it's
           | relatively cheap and plenty powerful to route gigabit+. I
           | prefer pf and the simplicity of OpenBSD over Debian for such
           | a purpose-built application. For my other "home servers" I
           | simply run Debian as I believe it to be one of the more sane
           | Linux choices for a server-type application.
        
       | secwang wrote:
       | I tried using OpenBSD, but the support for some specific things
       | isn't very good. For example, J language support is always
       | missing some packages. I also don't want to, and very much do not
       | want to, use systemd. I finally chose FreeBSD, but I'm using some
       | things from OpenBSD as much as possible, like obhttpd, etc. It
       | feels good now.
        
       | Guestmodinfo wrote:
       | I hope people here keep donating to the OpenBSD project. I have
       | myself not yet but I'm waiting yo do that
        
       | dilippkumar wrote:
       | Long time OpenBSD fan. Used it as my daily driver for years
       | before standardizing all computers at home to macOS. I still
       | think about going back to openBSD one day, but it's no longer
       | very practical as a daily driver.
       | 
       | I want to use OpenBSD for the next project I'm building. However,
       | I can't wrap my head around the old way of doing deployments
       | (before containers). People who've built production grade systems
       | with OpenBSD:
       | 
       | 1. How do you deploy software? 2. How do you manage fleets of
       | servers? 3. How do you spin up/turn down servers from cloud
       | providers? (I only know of Vultr who provided an OpenBSD option
       | out of the box).
        
         | hylaride wrote:
         | > Long time OpenBSD fan. Used it as my daily driver for years
         | before standardizing all computers at home to macOS. I still
         | think about going back to openBSD one day, but it's no longer
         | very practical as a daily driver.
         | 
         | It's only practical for hobbyists. I used OpenBSD as a daily
         | driver between 2001-2005. I fought, I suffered, I conquered,
         | and I got tired of not being able to watch video on the web
         | reliably and MacOS in those days was so clean and refreshing. I
         | learned so much, though.
         | 
         | > I want to use OpenBSD for the next project I'm building.
         | 
         | I admire your open-mindedness. But ask yourself:
         | 
         | 1. Do you want to have to upgrade fleets of servers every year
         | with no exceptions for extended security support instead of 5
         | (or more if you're willing to pay) for LTS versions of Linux?
         | 
         | 2. Who else will need to support it?
         | 
         | 3. You will likely have worse performance if that matters.
         | 
         | > 1. How do you deploy software?
         | 
         | Honestly, not many people create their own services that run on
         | OpenBSD. Those that do use old-school packaging and scripting.
         | Tooling like ansible works.
         | 
         | > 2. How do you manage fleets of servers?
         | 
         | Ansible would be my go-to for classic fleets of servers.
         | 
         | > How do you spin up/turn down servers from cloud providers?
         | 
         | There are ports of cloud-init for OpenBSD. Creating images for
         | third party OSes can be different levels of painful, depending
         | on the cloud provider.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | OpenBSD has virtualization out of the box now. Most of the
         | benefit of containers you can get with chroot. I don't know if
         | any of the developers are working on a true container/jail
         | capability.
         | 
         | I'd like to see a more modern performant filesystem with
         | OpenBSD but ffs has never really let me down. Capability for
         | logical volumes and/or live resizing of partitions would be
         | welcome as well.
        
         | indigodaddy wrote:
         | RE: 1/2, doesn't Ansible work for BSDs?
        
       | reilly3000 wrote:
       | Why isn't it used more often at BigCorp? Or as a base container
       | image?
        
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