OpenBSD 5.8 has been released. As usual, the list of changes goes way beyond my comfort zone – I’m not exactly into the world of BSD – but I’m pretty sure that those that use OpenBSD aren’t interested in oversimplified nonsense from people like me anyway.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=144515087006176&w=2
It is actually quite interesting to know outsiders’ perspectives, particularly about relative weight of certain features. It would be yet more interesting to read “My hour/day/week in OpenBSD” sort of article from you, Thom. Even more so, given that you are not a BSD person.
I agree, and I’m a OpenBSD user.
Edited 2015-10-20 14:26 UTC
I disagree. I hate nothing more than an *nix review which just consists of
What I would enjoy seeing is a discussion of how new features and updates to various packages impact the use of the os. Maybe a lot of the time its “Not Much”, but things like the vlan MTU change could open up new use cases that weren’t possible before. It would be nice to see a summary from someone who lives and dies by that vlan MTU. Rather than a generic rehash of the changelog.
OpenBSD does a release every 6 months (pretty fast), the changes that have an every day impact are actually limited.
It’s usually the big changes like that have the biggest impact like OpenBSD replacing their HTTP-webserver in the base install several times in the last few years.
At least that is my impression/opinion (I’m an OpenBSD user on firewalls/routers).
Edited 2015-10-20 20:15 UTC
Jonathan Levin has a lot to share: http://docs.macsysadmin.se/2014/video/Day4Session3.mp4
http://docs.macsysadmin.se/2015/video/Day4Session3.mp4
I care, but not enough to watch a video on it. Recorded talks about technology are usually painful for me to view. Text is greatly preferred. Unless its really, really interesting and related to something, I won’t watch them.
I was basically agreeing with Thom. Not worth any commentary from one not well versed in it. There too are many of those in various spots already.
I’d prefer some less “fixed (insert bug)” – “another great release!” type BSD (especially OpenBSD) “reviews” myself. It’s not a jab at Thom, as such, but that’s generally ALL I see each time there’s a release for Free/OpenBSD.
There needs to be a critical look at the features from a user’s point of view, whether it’s a server user, a desktop user, or a laptop user. Quite frankly I’ve run across a “feature” in OpenBSD that actually breaks the experience entirely for my desktop. Recently (past two releases) the firmware for Radeon video cards is either missing or improperly unpacked. It’s not a corner case video card, either. It’s an HD 7850 that’s been well supported till the past two releases. There’s apparently a workaround, but this is one of those “features” (explicit permission downloading firmware blobs) that’s sounds fine from a ideological point of view, but falls flat on it’s face in practice. It’s one thing to have to download firmware for a UVC device, quite another if you’ve got a blank screen because your video card’s driver is missing usable firmware.
So, honest critical reviews of software from qualified reviewers would be nice!
Would definitely be great, but in the case of something like OpenBSD, I’m certainly NOT a qualified reviewer
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Yeah, I don’t believe I’d be a good person to review anything like OpenBSD in a timely manner either. By the time it was finished and polished enough to be publishable it’d be time for the next iteration, I’d bet. I haven’t written software reviews for over 10 years. I did it as a hobby back then for a volunteer supported Linux website.
Gnome 3.16 is on the new software list.
Thought that it relies on systemd and dbus, and they are Linux only, are they not…
Maybe I should take a closer look to BSD.
It’s an ongoing effort by people who care enough about it to work on it:
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140219085851
This is a good tutorial for running OpenBSD as a desktop OS. It’s old, based on 5.5, but the installation process hasn’t really changed much so it’s still relevant:
http://alxjsn.com/unix/openbsd-laptop/
Well, OpenBSD is an oversimplified OS, which is really good from a security perspective. Easily one of the most simple, straightforward and sane unix-like OSes around. You can understand how it works pretty fast, it just makes sense (if you have some Unix background sure).
Now try to fully understand how OSX works if you dare!! Almost impossible, it’s a complete mess of technologies even worse than any modern Linux desktop (which is saying something haha).
Edited 2015-10-20 20:14 UTC
Indeed, I’ve found it to be the most straightforward and easiest BSD to pick up and understand. Like Slackware on the Linux side, it gives you exactly what you need for a complete, working system that is rock-solid and dependable, and anything else you want is available as a package or can be built from source.
It’s good to see news about some UNIX-based operating system once in a while. Kudos.
If anyone is interested in OpenBSD there were some recent interviews with developers on bestie.pl: http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-marc-espie/