I've been buying these little boxes from AliExpress for years to use as firewalls and routers. My oldest one is almost 9 years old now! OpenBSD installs just fine. Just a BIOS tweak to always boot up after power is restored.
If anyone wants to know what #OpenBSD looks like: In my case, it's just a Firefox window showing Fosstodon, taking up literally the whole screen. There is a one-pixel white border around it. Pretty boring.
if I were to start learning more about one of the listed BSD operating systems, which would you recommend? Guessing the answer could be different if we're talking about daily desktop usage vs server, so maybe clarify your answer via a reply if you can (fwiw, probably more interested in daily desktop usage, but open to whatever too).
I've been re-reconverting a lot of my "stuff" to the BSDs (Free, Open, Net). It's refreshing. The Linux every-tool-has-to-be-a-swiss-army-knife ethos is exhausting after a while. The relative simplicity and clean organization of *BSD (especially OpenBSD) re-affirms my fondness for UNIX-y things.
You might think there's not that much difference but, in many cases, I'd rather admin a BSD box. Try it, you'll see.
Also, NetBSD is soo lean, it has made my old Pentium III almost useful again. Even with 333Mhz and 128 MB of RAM 🙃
Hey #BSD friends. I want to try some bsd as my daly driver. Work and everything and I need some help to find live systems to try on my hardware. Any recomendation? #freebsd, #openbsd, #netbsd will work for me.
OMG, I love #OpenBSD. Never seen a major update on a [Li|U]n[u|i]x OS going through so smooth. And the sysmerge command that walks you through every config file change and let's you diff/merge/install them, is the perfect icing on the cake. 🍰
I don't have sympathy for #OpenBSD or #LibreSSL. However, I can understand that they had good reasons to fork OpenSSL, and that switching back today would be hard. I can understand projects refusing to officially declare support and rejecting workarounds.
OTOH, pushing LibreSSL hate to the point of blocking Python implementations that don't link to OpenSSL is just horrible. Users get in the crossfire, again.
I've just finished reading "Relayd and Httpd mastery" by @mwl and it cemented my plan to move to #OpenBSD. https://test.sapka.me is already working and https://michal.sapka.me will soon follow. I like the Relayd + Httpd + acme-client setup much better than whatever #nginx tries to achieve by trying to be everything.
It's the first book of his I've read - "Absolute FreeBSD" and "Ed mastery" were also great. I don't know of any other indie tech writer but I dig his writing so much! The fact, that he may be the only writer treating #BSD (my recent love) seriously makes it even easier. After finishing "Relayd.." I've instantly bought his "Tarsnap mastery". Highly recommended!
I've been thinking about an adventure with #selfhosted#email and guess what? MWL is working on a book about it!
In the meantime (so: yesterday) I migrated my personal laptop from #FreeBSD to #OpenBSD. I had to force legacy UEFI and disable Nvidia but everything just works. WiFi, hibernation, even media keys. I am floored!
Evening reflection, observing the little Raspberry Pi A that manages the outdoor lights (powered by FreeBSD): one of the reasons I chose FreeBSD over other BSDs and Linux is the ease of running it in read-only mode when installed on a UFS file system.
Just change "rw" to "ro" in /etc/fstab, and upon the next reboot, the system will operate in read-only mode.
For systems with unstable power or the potential for dirty reboots (especially when using memory cards not optimized for frequent writes), this can ensure near-infinite file system longevity.
This has often saved remote systems, even those powered by batteries or solar panels, from corruption and inaccessibility. Achieving the same with OpenBSD or NetBSD isn't difficult, as they always write to specific locations (easily mountable in RAM file systems), while many Linux distributions (except Alpine and a few others) tend to write all over the place, making the operation more complex.
#w3m on the lead, over #lynx and #links2. The latter has unfortunately already been uninstalled, because of fonts and encodings problems. Lynx still resists, but…