posts/2017-12-26-why-i-switched-to-openbsd.html

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   7 <title>Why I switched to OpenBSD</title>
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   9 <h1>azarus' page</h1>
  10 <h2>Why I switched to OpenBSD</h2>
  11 <p>Date: 2017-12-26</p>
  12 <p>I've always had a thing for simple, concise and readable software. In fact, my
  13 favourite pieces of software are from <a href="https://suckless.org">the suckless
  14 project</a>, especially <a href="https://st.suckless.org">st, the terminal
  15 emulator</a> and <a href="https://dwm.suckless.org">dwm, the dynamic window
  16 manager.</a>
  17
  18 <p>Now, I've grown rather disappointed in the Linux desktop. The few remaining
  19 somewhat "sane" distros (Gentoo, Artix, Void) are good, but they still don't
  20 really make me all that happy anymore. Lacklustre/bad documentation for common
  21 programs (*don't* get me started on `info`), bloated GNU utilities everywhere,
  22 and the whole philosophy doesn't appeal to me anymore. The Linux kernel grows
  23 everyday, with code of rather questionable quality. And userspace isn't looking
  24 good, either. We have PulseAudio, systemd, glibc becoming somewhat necessary for
  25 a normal desktop. One can always use alternatives, like I did for a while, with
  26 just plain ALSA, OpenRC and musl libc, but it just becomes a constant hassle to
  27 be fixing everything all the time. For example,
  28 <a href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/firefox-52-no-sound-pulseaudio-alsa-linux">
  29 Firefox dropped ALSA support</a> and it left me either installing a
  30 compatibility shim, called
  31 <a href="https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse">apulse</a>, or completely migrating
  32 to PulseAudio, which I'd really rather not!</p>
  33
  34 <p>After quite some consideration, I decided to give the *BSDs a try. First, I
  35 tried FreeBSD, and
  36 <a href="https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/">here's</a> a great
  37 guide for the FreeBSD desktop. FreeBSD has quite some neat features, like
  38 native ZFS, jails and bhyve! I read through most of the
  39 <a href="https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/book.html">FreeBSD handbook</a>,
  40 fixed some issues in the German translation, and installed it on one of my spare
  41 SSDs on my trusty, corebooted X230. It was quite nice, and just about everything
  42 worked without too much tinkering (I was suprised!), but there were some minor
  43 niggles, like fiddly WiFi (which wasn't a complete deal-breaker for me).</p>
  44
  45 <p>And as such, I decided to give OpenBSD a go. OpenBSD's philosophy appeals to
  46 me very strongly. They believe in strong security, and their aspiration is to be
  47 the *number one* in the industry for security. They also believe in full
  48 disclosure, frequent source code audits, and they make frequent
  49 <a href="https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html">security innovations</a> they
  50 are the source of programs that I can barely live without
  51 (<a href="https://www.openssh.com/">OpenSSH</a> and
  52 <a href="https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki">tmux</a> are notable examples).
  53 After installing the most recent OpenBSD snapshot with full disk encryption on
  54 my laptop, I was positively amazed. Up-to-date versions of all the software I
  55 use were available as binary packages, networking was a piece of cake to setup
  56 (a failover bridge with my wired and wireless interface allows me to never miss
  57 a packet when I dock and undock my laptop), documentation was delightful
  58 (actually useful manpages), xenocara (the OpenBSD fork of X.org) worked without
  59 any tweaking, my games worked (emulators are available for almost every console)
  60 all the suckless software I have compiled without any hiccups and the community
  61 was very helpful if I had any issues and they have the same affinity for simple,
  62 secure software that I have.</p>
  63
  64 <p>Yesterday, I switched my VPS (from which you're reading this page) to OpenBSD
  65 as well. It took some tweaking to work from my VPS provider, but it was worth
  66 it.  Prosody (the XMPP server I'm using) works just as well on OpenBSD as it
  67 does on Linux, and OpenBSD httpd is a perfect fit for this website. It's small,
  68 simple, secure by default, and easy to configure.</p>
  69
  70 <p>The only machine I haven't switched over is my main desktop computer. The
  71 reasons I haven't are that OpenBSD doesn't yet have good drivers for my AMD GPU,
  72 and that <a href="https://winehq.org">Wine</a> doesn't work on OpenBSD.</p>
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