what's good in openbsd superior than freebsd? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- angelafra · 2018-06-16 05:00 what's good in openbsd superior than freebsd? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stf · 2018-06-16 05:12 besides the normal 'security!' that openbsd touts: networking: it 'feels' better than in freebsd. pf and the init system on openbsd just come off across much more focused and easy to understand and use than in free. at least to me. (both crush the mess linux has) docs: openbsd's manuals are legit the best mandocs around. they actually are a manual, faq, tutorial all in one and explain everything extremely clearly. desktop: if your hardware is fully supported, the x system on openbsd just works, and works really well. here is what freebsd does better: zfs and jails. no comparison in openbsd and quite killer features if you need to use them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2018-06-16 11:31 >here is what freebsd does better: zfs and jails. I'll add a couple of things: - performance: there's just no comparison between the 2, the reasons are widely known, but for the skeptic, public benchs confirming it are available as reference - virtualization: again, no comparison; FreeBSD has bhyve (and vm- bhyve), VirtualBox, CentOS7 Linux compat Layer, and Wine. Outside the experimental VMM, OpenBSD has none of this. Despite KVM on Linux and Illumos, Xen on Linux and relatively NetBSD are more solid, mature and advanced solutions than bhyve and VBox on FreeBSD, both can be used and are used in production already,unlike VMM. Bhyve is improving amazingly fast and has been ported to Illumos too. And, last but not least, let's notice that a beginner who wants to watch Netflix or use Spotify or Skype on FreeBSD,can just throw Ubuntu on VirtualBox,install Google Chrome on it and forget about it with a 20 min work. - ports/package system: FreeBSD clearly boasts the most advanced packaging system (just think about poudriere and synth, or the fine and elegant build flag options control) - software availability: there's a a large gap in software support, KDE5 Plasma is just the last of FreeBSD's ports tree acquisition; MATLAB is another huge pro for some users - FreeBSD's UFS2: unlike OpenBSD's, supports TRIM and snapshots and does SU+J - beadm and boot environments - ARM support, especially arm64. IMHO FreeBSD is way ahead in ARM support,in terms of stability, performance and hardware support for each SoC. At least it used to be so 1 year ago when I decided to try OpenBSD on both Rpi3 and BeagleBone Black - sound. I don't know why people don't mention this often, but FreeBSD has just the best audio system and sound server support I've ever seen. Aside from the brilliant hardware support and the great performance, FreeBSD supports OSS, ALSA (emulated), JACK, Esound, sndio, NAS shamelessly and integrates them very well - upgrading. freebsd-update and done - DTrace - FreeBSD sources are located on a subversion mirror rather than a CVS mirror - an extremely active, intuitive, very featured forum, populated by friendly developers keen to help users and provide clarifications. mailing lists and IRC are great, but sometimes people just need a forum, supporting proper formatting. In addition, FreeBSD Bugzilla is just more powerful than the openbsd-bugs mailing list - Desktop oriented tools: DSBMD, because autofs and amd both suck at automounting, PC-BSD utils (zmanager, lifepreserver, mountray,firewall manager...), networkmgr, octopkg for the die-hard GUI fans. Then, >pf and the init system on openbsd just come off across much more focused and easy to understand and use than in free. Undoubtedly native PF OpenBSD's implementation is better than FreeBSD's,for being better integrated, up to date,featured, but FreeBSD has IPFW which easier to understand than PF. at least to me. Regarding the init system, rc scripts are almost indentical across BSDs, what difference did exactly brought you to the conclusion OpenBSD'RC is more focused and easy to understand? There's an entire chapter on FreeBSD Handbook regarding RC scripting, and it explains how it works rather thoroughly >docs: openbsd's manuals are legit the best mandocs around. they actually are a manual, faq, tutorial all in one and explain everything extremely clearly. This is a widely spread rumor, but have you ever seriously compared OpenBSD's mdoc database with FreeBSD's (which actually is extremely deteailed and well maintained too)? Can you provide some examples of man pages more in-depth explained and better designed in OpenBSD than the FreeBSD's counterpart? Let's remember that FreeBSD has the official Handbook, the wiki, and the Porter Handbook, which IMHO combined outclass OpenBSD FAQs,but to each his own >desktop: if your hardware is fully supported, the x system on openbsd just works, and works really well. OpenBSD has better suspend/resume on selected models (and not so many), and supports more wifi NICs (~5/4 FreeBSD's). I think the "OpenBSD just works on laptop" meme is largely due to the fantastic Thinkpad support and the fact most (all?) OpenBSD users seem to use Thinkpads. On the plus side AFAIK OpenBSD has no libinput, no touchscreen,practically no bluetooth support, no webcam support outside UVC models, and no nvidia support outside legacy models through the non-accelerated nv driver. Let's not forget FreeBSD caught up in integrates Intel and AMD Radeon support with 11.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- j0b · 2018-06-16 11:42 OpenBSD comes with a BGP daemon in the base install which for me is very useful ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackblack · 2018-06-16 12:48 no one has mentioned portability so I will. (openbsd is a fork of netbsd whose primary goal is portability). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ddsci · 2018-06-16 12:52 The install process, getting x started, using current.. No moronic CoC.. And that's just the first ten minutes. Edit: Haters apparently hate shit just working. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- angelafra · 2018-06-16 17:49 what is portability ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2018-06-16 18:44 ease at making the OS available/working (porting) on a different CPU architecture than the one it was first designed for, and OpenBSD is very good at that, outclassing FreeBSD in portability, although NetBSD is better ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kernigh · 2018-06-16 21:23 FreeBSD might be portable enough. Their website mentions [i386/amd64, arm, powerpc, and sparc64](https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/index.html). OpenBSD has [a few more platforms](https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html), and NetBSD has [more than 50 platforms](https://www.netbsd.org/ports/), but FreeBSD runs on many machines. To rank operating systems by portability, I would guess NetBSD 1st, Debian 2nd, OpenBSD 3rd, FreeBSD 4th. [FreeBSD/powerpc64](https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html#4) seems to be the only BSD to run on PowerPC in 64-bit mode. It runs on Macintosh G5 and PlayStation 3, and is [a work-in-progress on newer OpenPOWER machines](https://wiki.freebsd.org/powerpc). NetBSD is the only BSD to run on some 32-bit PowerPC machines. I have OpenBSD/macppc on a New World Macintosh, but FreeBSD and NetBSD can also run on this kind of machine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cmason37 · 2018-06-16 22:44 Does it still apply though? The OpenBSD fork happened in the 90s & from what I understand the codebases have diverged significantly since then, to the point where OpenBSD is no longer just a NetBSD fork. The projects also have different leadership with different goals, is portability even a current primary objective of OpenBSD, or is it mainly just security? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackblack · 2018-06-17 01:05 yes it still applies though some ports have been dropped by OpenBSD. I'm sure it relates to the architecture inherited from NetBSD. I think this is also an advantage that the code in OpenBSD appears to be a of a higher standard than FreeBSD IMHO (though hard to judge without working on both projects myself). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- boy_named_su · 2018-06-18 15:57 doas, pledge, pf, and a variety of very simple and secure services like ldapd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Queen_Cherry_Muffin · 2018-06-18 16:47 FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's pf implementations have diverged enough to the point that they are not (in my mind) really even comparable anymore. FreeBSD forked OpenBSD's pf a long time ago. However, FreeBSD did a lot of modifications to the pf code to make it multiprocessor safe and performant. OpenBSD's implementation is still single-threaded. As a result, OpenBSD's changes to the pf code over time are hard, if not impossible, to merge with FreeBSD. For example: - OpenBSD's version of pf uses a new syntax. FreeBSD's version still uses the old syntax. This means OpenBSD's latest guides for pf are not really applicable to FreeBSD. - FreeBSD's version still has AltQ. OpenBSD removed that awhile ago. - Pretty sure that FreeBSD and OpenBSD pf handle NAT and redirection differently now. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dchestnykh · 2018-06-19 22:12 https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours- full_paper.pdf ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3G6A5W338E · 2018-06-23 13:49 Great, but outdated. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BumpitySnook · 2018-06-24 03:09 It's from a talk from 2017. Care to summarize any specific points you think are outdated? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3G6A5W338E · 2018-06-24 11:48 There's been SMP progress in all BSDs other than Freebsd. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- quasikaote · 2018-06-26 00:41 Can anyone elaborate on the virtualization in OpenBSD? I know FreeBSD jails are legit, but is there no alternative for OpenBSD? I was thinking of trying to build lxc and lxd from source or just going with vmm. Someone mentioned vmm isn't really in production environments much. I am trying to decide between FreeBSD and OpenBSD myself. The jails + ZFS thing is kind of owning at the moment in my head. But I used to love slackware back in the day, so the idea of compiling a bunch of things from source doesn't bother me much.