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from the maybe-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.
Software developer Cullum Smith has written a detailed blog post as a guide to a secure and streamlined installation of OpenBSD 6.4 on a laptop. He goes through installation, networking, initial configuration and advanced customization, getting started with the graphical interface, and adding packages including the Chromium web browser. He also touches on multimedia and battery questions as well as updates. As usual, OpenBSD lives up to the do it well or not at all philosophy.
It's been almost a year since I've posted any articles, and I'm afraid I have a confession to make...I've joined the dark side! Most people know my site from the How to Run a Mail Server post, which targeted FreeBSD. A few months ago, I converted all that infrastructure to an automated OpenBSD platform. Turns out OpenBSD was so much easier, I decided to run it as a desktop too.
You won't find nearly as many online resources about setting up OpenBSD, because honestly, you really don't need any. Unlike much of Linux and FreeBSD, the included manuals are high quality, coherent, and filled with practical examples. You also need very little third party software to do basic tasks—almost everything you need is well-integrated into the base system.
[Years back, I'd read of issues with laptops and entering/exiting hibernate/suspend modes, driving internal/external displays, and limited run-time on battery power; how well have these been straightened out? What laptops are BSD/Linux-friendly and what distribution do you run on yours? --Ed.]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:13PM (3 children)
Thing is, this is not a witty phrase meaning "do all things well."
OpenBSD sometimes [ycombinator.com] considers "do it not at all" as a perfectly valid choice.
While OpenBSD's positions on security are laudable, their positions on compatibility can be... less so.
Every choice is a balance. OpenBSD is perhaps a more specialized, not generalized, tool, that can be the right choice in a wide variety of situations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)
It's not a witty phrase meaning "do all things well."
Rather, it's a phrase meaning "do it well or not at all".
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:25AM
Kind of like "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:41PM
As to your Wine/ycombinator remark: you can run any windows version, and applications, on OpenBSD, using qemu. You will be limited, though, in the amount of RAM you can use in that case.
A better (technical) example of a compromise might be wireshark, the network sniffing tool, which was permanently removed from the available packages somewhere around 2007-8 for software security reasons. Instead you'll have to use [start from] tcpdump if you want to analyze network packet flows -- a lot less convenient, but a price any network engineer should be happy to pay for increased security.
As to the Editor's query in the submission: I've never really had any serious problems*, while I've switched completely to openbsd on a laptop since 2009. Quite a number of OpenBSD developers, however, seem to run it on Thinkpads; and so do I.
*X server problems, sometimes, in the olden days (2006 - 10): but then it did run on some real junk too.