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Peter N. M. Hansteen walks through use of OpenBSD on a modern laptop in his latest blog post. While OpenBSD has a good reputation for servers and routers, many do not realize how well it works on laptops with supported hardware. He's been running it as the only OS on his laptops for well over a decade at this point and shares his experience with recent hardware. OpenBSD is clean, organized, and predictable. It does what you configure it to do, and only that, with no backtalk or second-guessing — like from other systems. Its documentation is second to none.
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(Score: 2) by https on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:24PM (2 children)
OpenBSD's update process is byzantine and not fully documented ("First, recompile the base system...", seriously?). The terminology used re: branches and releases is inconsistent at best. At a minimum each port must be done manually, and most who've written about it seems to agree that it's simpler to just re-install when an update comes out.
Say what you want about systemd, debian's process for keeping a desktop up-to-date on security matters is straightforward and can be taught to a noob in less than one minute. After two weeks of research on OpenBSD updates getting me nowhere, I quietly said "fuck this noise" and went to FreeBSD for a desktop. Maybe I was spoiled by fifteen years of running debian, and it only takes two weeks and a day to learn OpenBSD's update process...
Security updates might as well not exist if you can't apply them.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:13PM (1 child)
Security updates might as well not exist if you can't apply them.
There are third party (trusted by OpenBSD) sources of patches. So you don't have to compile them yourself. Joe Random User is better off subscribing to one of these (free) than attempting to maintain it himself.
But clearly they expect you to have a complete source tree and dev tools installed. Its essentially a rolling release at the source code level, with a snapshot new point release at regular intervals.
Its not hard to maintain the system that way as long as you set it all up properly to follow current in the first place, keep your source tree in sync, and don't let maintenance slide. You rarely have to compile all of it, because you usually start from one of those snapshots.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:29AM
For those who like stability, there's a -stable branch that has the "very important fixes" from -current.