I've used OpenBSD the last year or so (as a bastion/jump host for a few systems) after using *BSD systems very little for probably the past decade, and... good lord I love it so much.
Say what you want about the benefits of systemd or the usefulness of other parts of what is now unavoidable with Linux, and I won't argue with many of them, but OpenBSD just feels like a *nix system is supposed to. `ps aux` is like 10 entries at first. `pf` makes so much sense. `man` pages are consistently incredible. The security/cryptography focus, managing services, pledge/unveil... so many things about it is just *chef's kiss*.
It's not and will probably never be a daily driver for me and it may not fit your use case for anything, but I highly recommend playing with it.
I love this part of OpenBSD so much. FreeBSD is very good as well on this front. Sometimes the terseness of the man pages gets to me, but it's all there.
I used OpenBSD as a daily driver way back, somewhere around v3.5, on a somewhat elderly Thinkpad. It was perfectly adequate. I still use it for various systems that I pretty much just set and forget. Extremely reliable, and pf is top tier.
Forget the artwork and check out the accompanying song and lyrics for the new release.
I think it's one of the funnier ones so far.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
To me that cringiness is oh so wonderful. Everyone is so weirdly afraid of their image, of how others think of them.
We've become sterile; caricatures of ourselves so that we can adhere to the groupthink. It's refreshing to see people unashamed to be themselves, with all of their weird parts.
Real stupidity is still available, you just have to opt in. Yesterday I spent an evening writing Game of Life in Prolog for no good reason, and it gave me 941 live cells instead of 18,885 because my neighbour rule counted diagonals twice. Finding that bug by hand was more fun than anything an agent did for me that day. The pointless tinkering didn't go away, we just have to choose it now.
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss;
I can't see why; it's a goofy 20th-century colloquialism popularized by Bugs Bunny cartoons as a substitute "damn". I sincerely doubt the original author meant anything else.
You can't see how using "cotton-picking hands" as a negative term can cause backlash? If the phrase was something like "don't break anything in this cotton-picking rack", I would understand, but "keep your cotton-picking hands away"?
I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.
You are not supposed to, it is intended to represent(and probably is) a machine generated image.
I have not really formalized my thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to. It feels great to get the machine to generate a thing for you but it feels terrible to receive a thing from somebody that is machine generated.
The worse part is the paranoia, Now I am seeing "tells" of machine generated content, and it may or may not be. But I have already lost interest.
The real irony would be that it is a hand drawn image carefully animated to feel machine generated.
I mainly don't like the self-destructive aspect. Even if it's a spoof.
Especially when I see all the self-destructive goings-on in the world, based on senselessly divisive beliefs or just the power-seeking that generates them to divide and conquer.
I once met Ken Bering, "The Wheelchair Guy" whose foundation provided wheelchairs for people who could not afford them. The wheels weren't spiked, nor were they like a Seinfeld episode, where George donates a cheap wheelchair with poor brakes that sends its occupant down a steep hill.
> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.
They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.
The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :
ssh myopenbsdbox # log-in to your machine
doas sysupgrade # will log you out, go drink some coffee
ssh myopenbsdbox # log-in to the upgraded machine
doas sysmerge # (optional) solve merge conflicts of your cfg files
doas pkg_add -u # (optional) upgrade local packages
> What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm
everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.
The best place to go for curated patches is here. You can customize these or roll your own once you have a chance to examine the source code. dwm is very simple.
The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.
For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.
But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.
The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.
So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.
The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.
Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.
I don’t think the theme is “anti‐AI.” I think what it’s trying to express is something along the lines of “take responsibility for your code,” where one’s code is the code one unleashes upon the world.
Even Xen (VM used by Qubes) periodically has CVEs, although they don’t always affect Qubes due to additional layers of defense and/or limited hardware targets.
CPU flaws are even more daunting. OpenBSD's BDFL, Theo De Rhaadt, had what some called harsh but accurate words for Intel CPUs when Meltdown was uncovered.
Rhaadt and Stallman have something in common in that they have been vindicated in near biblical proportions, often far long after presenting their stance and having been casually derided for it.
There is today still no real mitigation for the side channel flaws collectively named Spectre flaws. A look at Jonathan Perry's work, adjacent to the side channel stuff, tells us that most modern CPUs still not end of life today are truly single-tenant.
When reading AWS' writing on side channel flaws, someone who skims that writing will leave with a different conclusion than someone who reads what AWS has shared in its entirety and reads it slowly.
The only truly effective way to isolate applications effectively, in a way accessible to people in average financial stature, is to put them on different CPUs (hello dual and quad socket server boards). Thanks to the prevalence of inexpensive ARM and Risc-V based single board computers, although this requires advanced skills with operating systems and relevant tooling this is practicable (as ugly as it is).
There are some new general purpose processors made from ISA that don't use any form of speculative execution. These may be undoing decades of bad-assumptions cruft. Those who deserve these processors won't wait for retail channels to deliver them.
I've used OpenBSD as a laptop daily driver for nearly 20 years. It's small. It remains mostly consistent between updates. In fact, it's so stable that I barely notice changes when I upgrade until I go hunting for them.
The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.
Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router.
Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.
Is it possible to get a modern filesystem with openbsd or are they still stuck in the past? Also, is it possible to run openbsd without jumping through hoops on a laptop from 2025 including suspend, graphics, web browser?
I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.
By default, OpenBSD uses FFS / FFS2. There is an effort in place to port GeFS (from 9front) to OpenBSD. It's unlikely that ZFS will be ported to OpenBSD, due to licensing incompatibilities. For the same reason, btrfs is also unlikely. That's why I run FreeBSD on my big server, and OpenBSD on my laptop and other edge devices. I don't really have any issues running FFS on a laptop; it seems overkill to run anything more advanced than that.
I'd recommend taking a look on forums to see what other folks are running. If it's a modern Lenovo with integrated graphics or an AMD GPU, it will be supported before others. OpenBSD folks tend to use Lenovos. My best recommendation is to pick a laptop that a core maintainer is using, unless you feel comfortable making your own patches. They have AMD GPU support via DRM from Linux. Intel graphics typically works alright.
OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases. Building Chromium or Firefox from source is... well, I have a 2012 laptop, so that's not something I am going to do. Regardless, you'd need to be pretty comfortable with applying OpenBSD specific patches to one of these browsers, which isn't always obvious, especially since they are moving targets.
If you're used to being on a rolling release Linux, this will be a bit disorienting. But, in my opinion, it's significantly more stable and better thought out.
> OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases.
Just to clarify here, security patches are backported to -stable. So it is not like you stick to the same browser release for six months.
Personally, I run www/firefox-esr. In part because the ESR moves more slowly in general and in part because it is maintained by someone working for Mozilla.
Excellent answer. Thank you very much. I will keep this in mind when the next life cycling of my current laptop happens. I will keep an eye on the core teams laptop experiments as well if there's anything about that available. Will search the mailinglists.
OpenBSD usually has far fewer hoops than Linux on laptops - IME, either it works or it doesn't. Pretty much any x86 machine that isn't bleeding edge is going to work.
Does the version number going from v7.X->v8.0 mean that this is a larger update than v7.8->v7.9, or does the numbering just automatically roll over to the next major version when it reaches vX.9?
By that point medicine will be sufficiently advanced that we can graft new fingers on him, obviously. That'll also make him more productive, given he's an emacs user.
I run -current these days on most desktops. What I can say is that since 7.9, I have experienced smoother audio playback and system load overall on my decade-old laptop. So, it is likely that others will experience similar things when moving to 8.0.
Phoronix do test BSDs from time to time. But for different reasons I think OpenBSd missed twice. I hope to see the performance gap being close enough we can stop thinking it is very slow.
I don't know how his basement rack looks but they are continuing slowly eliminating old architectures with almost no surviving hardware or that are unsupported by Clang. Loongson was eliminated in this release.
It is largely if there is someone interested in maintaining the port. My favorite port is the luna88k an obscure Japanese unix workstation/server from the early 90's. I don't know how common they were in Japan, rare is my guess, and non-existent elsewhere, but there is one(only one as far as I can tell) dedicated Japanese developer willing to put the work in to keep it current. and every release a month or two after the official release he announces that the package build is done(it takes that long on the hardware).
I don't know how many users of luna88k there are, I don't frequent anywhere near the same ecosystem they would, but have never seen one, So from my point of view it is one person making releases for himself and I love that dedication. I don't have, nor do I want a luna88k, but it great that it exists.
So as far as I can tell that is all it takes to have a published obsd port, one person willing to put the work in.
What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!
I like OpenBSD, but I don't think this is a specific reason to appreciate it as any decent OS these days has been upgradeable release upon release safely for more than 2 decades, regardless if it is a linux distro, an Open/Net/FreeBSD system, a macOS or Windows system.
That's pushing the timelines a bit. I had more than one early Ubuntu completely hose itself on dist-upgrade pre 16.04, despite it being based on Debian for which such things have never been a problem for me. Until 22.04->24.04 my rule was always to reinstall as a result.
I believe my current Fedora install started as a Fedora 26 so rougly 10 years without issues on 2 different laptops with same install?
On servers I have changed providers so it never lasted as long but at work we upgraded ubuntu LTS at least twice on same hardware.
Before Fedora I had similar experience with slackware, freebsd, openbsd and ubuntu on my daily drivers.
The only upgrade that ever broke a system of mine was my own fault by not reading news on archlinux website and upgrading blindly right when they were doing the changes with /bin /usr/bin. But Arch is different, it is opinionated and not expected to be free of human homework.
I agree that it's great but as an anecdote, I have an arch linux laptop i upgrade 1-2 times a year and it still works too, been that way since 2019 so went through major kernel upgrades without a hitch. Only thing that ever broke were nvidia drivers sometimes because it's an shudders OPTIMUS laptop. Last time I updated it, vibe coding wasn't widespread yet so I am wondering if new package versions will finally kill it if I were to upgrade it now
I have an old(mutters to self don't look at date then I will feel old... Oh god it's from 2012) lenovo laptop that is my daily driver for portable ops. I run openbsd on it and... well it's perfect. sleeps perfectly, radio works well, I understand the OS. I will be very sad when it dies.
I did just re do the heatsink compound, so hopefully it has many years left, but I worry about the fan.
>What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!
This is table stakes. Debian has had this since, IIRC, 1999.
I find it quite annoying that I have to have a monitor plugged in for the upgrade to work.
Otherwise it reboots into the old version after downloading.
Is this a common problem?
I have a similar issue, my router won’t reboot without a monitor plugged in to the hdmi port. Displayport worked fine during the installation. It was clever enough to not work with a dummy hdmi dongle either.
Good job and much clearer release notes than the ones I was reading about recent Linux release by the way.. much more informative and better organised to understand the impact in practical terms. #BSD_hellyeah
When I read the Changelog I had to check if it was April Fools day. Is this a real OpenBSD release? Feels early. Also, many of those changes don't sound like real OpenBSD changes.
Thank you. Was just wondering because the items in the Changelog look.... LLMish. Not something I'd have expected from OpenBSD. On the other hand, it looks like they've done a bunch of improvements I'd have assumed they'd done years ago. I wouldn't blame them.
Since 2010, every hurdle I have encountered booting FreeBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, and Linux on Apple's Intel Macintoshes has been overcome with rEFInd by Rodsbooks.
If you have one of Apple's Intel Macintoshes with a T2 security chip, you may want to do a search with ChatGPT through one of the free portals out there to boot something "foreign" to what Apple's secure boot with the T2 security chip already recognizes.
When putting together rootfs on top of what others would consider to be "complicated", reaching for rEFInd when I should probably have run a small PXE server off a Pi did speed things up. rEFInd has been a good general purpose bootloader, simple tool.
In my aged existing familiarity with rEFInd, its docs may not spoon feed you the answer but if you know what you're looking for and what you want to do can be done, you'll find it.
The upgrade from 7.9 to 8.0 went completely smooth on a bastion host I have running with openbsd; from start to finish it took about ten minutes. Kudos to the team!
> * All: switch the fallback implementation of the ed25519 signature
algorithm used when libcrypto is disabled from SUPERCOP ed25519
to libsodium. The libsodium implementation includes a number of
strictness checks over the original reference implementation we
have used to this point and a more ergonomic API.
like a virus, slop will infect the techsphere, and it will become a real pain in the bollocks to siftt thru the mountains of semi-slop just to get to the real, reliable and human-made stuff.
I'm smoking natural gas to move the turbine that generates electricity so an overpriced GPU filled up with overpriced memory can give an interesting answer to this post :)
Humans make predictable mistakes, AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Hallucination occurs where you least expected for ANY reason. Can you say the same about humans? Unless the human in question is mentally ill.
The loudmouths who think I'm wrong are simply not sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work. It's just pattern-matching and heuristics-based at that. The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's meh.
I've used OpenBSD the last year or so (as a bastion/jump host for a few systems) after using *BSD systems very little for probably the past decade, and... good lord I love it so much.
Say what you want about the benefits of systemd or the usefulness of other parts of what is now unavoidable with Linux, and I won't argue with many of them, but OpenBSD just feels like a *nix system is supposed to. `ps aux` is like 10 entries at first. `pf` makes so much sense. `man` pages are consistently incredible. The security/cryptography focus, managing services, pledge/unveil... so many things about it is just *chef's kiss*.
It's not and will probably never be a daily driver for me and it may not fit your use case for anything, but I highly recommend playing with it.
>`man` pages are consistently incredible
I love this part of OpenBSD so much. FreeBSD is very good as well on this front. Sometimes the terseness of the man pages gets to me, but it's all there.
I used OpenBSD as a daily driver way back, somewhere around v3.5, on a somewhat elderly Thinkpad. It was perfectly adequate. I still use it for various systems that I pretty much just set and forget. Extremely reliable, and pf is top tier.
OpenBSD man pages are the Sistine Chapel ceiling of man pages. Just glorious.
It is kind of ironic the whole Linus vs Tanenbaum argument, given the amount of processes running on any modern Linux distribution.
I’ve used it on and off since about 1999. It certainly feels more like Unix than anything else.
It is a heck of a system. I love it too.
I have CD distros from 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 in a drawer somewhere. I wish I bought more merch over the years:
https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html
This looks down atm; hopefully it will be up again soon:
https://openbsdstore.com/
It worked great on a home lab of old salvaged sparc stations, 68k macs, and 32bit PCs.
I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.
https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike-s.gif
Forget the artwork and check out the accompanying song and lyrics for the new release. I think it's one of the funnier ones so far. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
Just as cringeworthy as the QT4 dance
To me that cringiness is oh so wonderful. Everyone is so weirdly afraid of their image, of how others think of them.
We've become sterile; caricatures of ourselves so that we can adhere to the groupthink. It's refreshing to see people unashamed to be themselves, with all of their weird parts.
It lost one eye, but that's ok, it still has two left.
Is it a pun?
The Simps on AI
The Simpson AI?
And then the 3 eyes fish makes a reference to Blinky
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Cars_in_Every_Garage_an...
Nice! Think there was a gap in release-accompanying songs from 7.4 to 7.8 or I missed them. Seems they are back on track now.
“Back in my day we didn't have artificial intelligence, we had real stupidity - and we liked it.”
Real stupidity is still available, you just have to opt in. Yesterday I spent an evening writing Game of Life in Prolog for no good reason, and it gave me 941 live cells instead of 18,885 because my neighbour rule counted diagonals twice. Finding that bug by hand was more fun than anything an agent did for me that day. The pointless tinkering didn't go away, we just have to choose it now.
Now implement Prolog in your Game of Life and observe the Universe fold in on itself.
[flagged]
relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Man, I love the spirit of the blinkenlights warning, but the "cotten-pickenen hans" bit makes it hard to use the original for anything.
I can't see why; it's a goofy 20th-century colloquialism popularized by Bugs Bunny cartoons as a substitute "damn". I sincerely doubt the original author meant anything else.
You can't see how using "cotton-picking hands" as a negative term can cause backlash? If the phrase was something like "don't break anything in this cotton-picking rack", I would understand, but "keep your cotton-picking hands away"?
I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.
Yeah.. the last line is enough for the reference.
I suspect it is social commentary on the dangers of letting the machine do all your thinking for you.
Or merely a single portrayal of a puffer subject to the socio-technological forces of this generation.
I really like OpenBSD. I have used it for years. I feel the folks there are very helpful and awesome but I also do not like that graphic.
You are not supposed to, it is intended to represent(and probably is) a machine generated image.
I have not really formalized my thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to. It feels great to get the machine to generate a thing for you but it feels terrible to receive a thing from somebody that is machine generated.
The worse part is the paranoia, Now I am seeing "tells" of machine generated content, and it may or may not be. But I have already lost interest.
The real irony would be that it is a hand drawn image carefully animated to feel machine generated.
Credit is given to yvaneht nioj and clanker
Yeah. To me, I feel like Theo de Raadt is being a comedian here, and the joke probably went over some heads.
I thought it was hilarious
If your joke is to smear your face with shit, don't be surprised when people aren't laughing with you.
To be fair, I'm reading it as satire of AI. So not liking it is kind of the point.
I mainly don't like the self-destructive aspect. Even if it's a spoof.
Especially when I see all the self-destructive goings-on in the world, based on senselessly divisive beliefs or just the power-seeking that generates them to divide and conquer.
I once met Ken Bering, "The Wheelchair Guy" whose foundation provided wheelchairs for people who could not afford them. The wheels weren't spiked, nor were they like a Seinfeld episode, where George donates a cheap wheelchair with poor brakes that sends its occupant down a steep hill.
Oh well.
They're just showing humility. Give them a break.
that's the point
It's satire
I would guess it is the pelican on a bicycle reimagined ;)
And a reference to a meme of someone sticking a pipe into their own bike and complaining about someone else.
We need to find out which LLM was used to generate this benchmark image, it is the frontier now!
I don't like it being 8MB and taking 53 seconds to download from this server!
It's rare to even see a "real" gif rather than webm or other optimised format, I don't know if that choice is part of the commentary or not.
I would just like to say that the Simpsons Already Did It: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky
The theme this time is from The Simpsons, so yeah that is where they got it from. https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
Wow, that’s a weird coincidence.
It's not a coincidence. The song is called "The Simps on AI". They're definitely referencing Blinky.
The art is credited to yvaneht nioj, another simpsons reference.
Which reminds me of the Ralph Wiggum music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b403GtvwyEc
Sometimes I'm genuinely surprised that people can't recognise such obvious sarcasm
Earth was created six thousand years ago and we were running short on souls so we had to borrow a few chips from xAI.
It's like a pelican on a bicycle, but with social commentary.
> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.
They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.
The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :
Don't forget: doas syspatch. They tend to find some minor issues rather quickly after release.
Since I maintain my own custom patch set under OpenBSD, this is also usually when I need to vendor in the new release and update all of my patches.
Yup. I have heard the siren call. I’ll be putting it on an old fanless sbc router I have that is just sitting around since I upgraded.
What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm
> What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm
everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.
I use a custom dwm.
I thought that's just dwm :)
That should be the case, but you'd be surprised how many people just run stock dwm. I don't get it.
All of the "suckless" distributions beg to be patched.
Is there a nice place curating the best patches? Or a bespoke distribution of sorts for dwm?
The best place to go for curated patches is here. You can customize these or roll your own once you have a chance to examine the source code. dwm is very simple.
https://dwm.suckless.org/
> The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years
The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.
The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.
But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.
> a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade`
That is still wrong.
The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.
So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.
The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.
It's a big job.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...
Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.
I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.
I'm pretty sure it takes more to move debian 11 to debian 12 and Arch doesn't even have versions
Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.
Hey, you'd love this one:
To undo, it's: (now, where is guix-bsd?..)https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Upgrading-Gui...
And don't forget to cross your fingers so the upgrade does not break your system... like what happened to me when systemd came out.
A typical Debian upgrade process is more involved than that.
OpenLSD, bicycle day edition?
It's a reference to your basic 'Baton Roue' meme.
I assume it's meant to represent the perspective of pro-AI people, but it's ambiguous.
Puffy's always looked kind of weird. I remember when they gave the damn fish human lips a few times and it always put me off
"Wireframe Puffy" T-shirt design with the 'human lips' was always my favorite. Hope they bring it back.
https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html
This is an amazing image, I am fully on board with whatever it is.
Is the animation comically slow for anyone else?
I love it too. It's nice to be able to enjoy some art with personality when everything out there is inoffensive and bland art.
that's the gif loading, it should be fast once it's done
similar on the front page https://www.openbsd.org/index.html , "UNDSREA LREER"
it seems very much like social commentary.
Tell me tis not AI, cause it sure as hell looks like one.
It is clearly AI generated and that’s the message.
It's satire
It's literally in the name
it's a parody of LLM generated images, referencing the pelican benchmark. I suppose the image itself is hand -drawn and stylized for genAI slop
It gets better: https://www.openbsd.org/images/blowfishonbike.html
That's Puffy, a yellow, spiky pufferfish, on a bike.
And so it begins.
SlopenBSD.
Disappointing OpenBSD is and all of software is descending into slop.
Don't care if it is satire or not.
Agreed. Lowering yourself to the level of the AI drones is the first step to becoming one of them.
Before they were anti-AI edgelords, they were anti-VM edgelords.
Now they ship their own hypervisor in the base system.
I don’t think the theme is “anti‐AI.” I think what it’s trying to express is something along the lines of “take responsibility for your code,” where one’s code is the code one unleashes upon the world.
But that’s just my interpretation.
It's not that they were anti VM, they just didn't think it was a proper security boundary.
And they've been proven correct. Even the "secure" variety with hardware level encryption turned out to be vulnerable.
Even Xen (VM used by Qubes) periodically has CVEs, although they don’t always affect Qubes due to additional layers of defense and/or limited hardware targets.
CPU flaws are even more daunting. OpenBSD's BDFL, Theo De Rhaadt, had what some called harsh but accurate words for Intel CPUs when Meltdown was uncovered.
Rhaadt and Stallman have something in common in that they have been vindicated in near biblical proportions, often far long after presenting their stance and having been casually derided for it.
There is today still no real mitigation for the side channel flaws collectively named Spectre flaws. A look at Jonathan Perry's work, adjacent to the side channel stuff, tells us that most modern CPUs still not end of life today are truly single-tenant.
When reading AWS' writing on side channel flaws, someone who skims that writing will leave with a different conclusion than someone who reads what AWS has shared in its entirety and reads it slowly.
The only truly effective way to isolate applications effectively, in a way accessible to people in average financial stature, is to put them on different CPUs (hello dual and quad socket server boards). Thanks to the prevalence of inexpensive ARM and Risc-V based single board computers, although this requires advanced skills with operating systems and relevant tooling this is practicable (as ugly as it is).
There are some new general purpose processors made from ISA that don't use any form of speculative execution. These may be undoing decades of bad-assumptions cruft. Those who deserve these processors won't wait for retail channels to deliver them.
I've used OpenBSD as a laptop daily driver for nearly 20 years. It's small. It remains mostly consistent between updates. In fact, it's so stable that I barely notice changes when I upgrade until I go hunting for them.
The Lenovo laptop I use as my travel laptop and console display is a 2012. It still runs OpenBSD just fine.
AOL 'me too' here :)
Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router.
Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.
Is it possible to get a modern filesystem with openbsd or are they still stuck in the past? Also, is it possible to run openbsd without jumping through hoops on a laptop from 2025 including suspend, graphics, web browser?
I want this to be the case, because the more Linux petrifies, the more a free BSD option is needed.
GeFS is in the works. I hope it gets into the tree some day:
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260918115729
Thats great to hear! I also love the title for this talk about it:
GEFS: The File Shredder of the Future. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/
By default, OpenBSD uses FFS / FFS2. There is an effort in place to port GeFS (from 9front) to OpenBSD. It's unlikely that ZFS will be ported to OpenBSD, due to licensing incompatibilities. For the same reason, btrfs is also unlikely. That's why I run FreeBSD on my big server, and OpenBSD on my laptop and other edge devices. I don't really have any issues running FFS on a laptop; it seems overkill to run anything more advanced than that.
I'd recommend taking a look on forums to see what other folks are running. If it's a modern Lenovo with integrated graphics or an AMD GPU, it will be supported before others. OpenBSD folks tend to use Lenovos. My best recommendation is to pick a laptop that a core maintainer is using, unless you feel comfortable making your own patches. They have AMD GPU support via DRM from Linux. Intel graphics typically works alright.
OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases. Building Chromium or Firefox from source is... well, I have a 2012 laptop, so that's not something I am going to do. Regardless, you'd need to be pretty comfortable with applying OpenBSD specific patches to one of these browsers, which isn't always obvious, especially since they are moving targets.
If you're used to being on a rolling release Linux, this will be a bit disorienting. But, in my opinion, it's significantly more stable and better thought out.
> OpenBSD works well with relatively recent versions of Chromium and Firefox. That being said, they are on a six month release cycle. The Chromium port can fall behind if you stick to -stable or releases.
Just to clarify here, security patches are backported to -stable. So it is not like you stick to the same browser release for six months.
Personally, I run www/firefox-esr. In part because the ESR moves more slowly in general and in part because it is maintained by someone working for Mozilla.
Not the case for chromium and ungoogled-chromium... at least I can't find them in packages-stable directory.
Thank you, I think you are correct. Compare:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=ungoogled-chromium
To:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&s=firefox-esr
You will see that the Firefox patches are tagged for -release/-stable and the Chromium ones are not.
Excellent answer. Thank you very much. I will keep this in mind when the next life cycling of my current laptop happens. I will keep an eye on the core teams laptop experiments as well if there's anything about that available. Will search the mailinglists.
OpenBSD usually has far fewer hoops than Linux on laptops - IME, either it works or it doesn't. Pretty much any x86 machine that isn't bleeding edge is going to work.
Does the version number going from v7.X->v8.0 mean that this is a larger update than v7.8->v7.9, or does the numbering just automatically roll over to the next major version when it reaches vX.9?
No, the major number has no special significance to OpenBSD. 8.0 is just what comes after 7.9.
as linus torvalds puts it: big numbers confuse me, so the next kernel version will be 7.0
He ran out of fingers and toes to count on. (Wait, what comes after 19.19, or 20.19, 20.20, then what?)
By that point medicine will be sufficiently advanced that we can graft new fingers on him, obviously. That'll also make him more productive, given he's an emacs user.
Linux Vice City and then Linux San Andreas.
Did they ever have a Linux 6.9?
A sixty-nine interupted by a period?
Oh you
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Yes, all the way up to 6.19 in fact!
In recent past releases there was a noticeable improvement to SMP related networking bits.
Does anyone have benchmarks between 8.0 and previous releases in that department?
I run -current these days on most desktops. What I can say is that since 7.9, I have experienced smoother audio playback and system load overall on my decade-old laptop. So, it is likely that others will experience similar things when moving to 8.0.
Here are some.
http://bluhm.genua.de/test.html
Phoronix do test BSDs from time to time. But for different reasons I think OpenBSd missed twice. I hope to see the performance gap being close enough we can stop thinking it is very slow.
I was always curious how does (Theo's?) rack in the basement look like nowadays. How it changed? New machines added/removed?
I don't know how his basement rack looks but they are continuing slowly eliminating old architectures with almost no surviving hardware or that are unsupported by Clang. Loongson was eliminated in this release.
It is largely if there is someone interested in maintaining the port. My favorite port is the luna88k an obscure Japanese unix workstation/server from the early 90's. I don't know how common they were in Japan, rare is my guess, and non-existent elsewhere, but there is one(only one as far as I can tell) dedicated Japanese developer willing to put the work in to keep it current. and every release a month or two after the official release he announces that the package build is done(it takes that long on the hardware).
I don't know how many users of luna88k there are, I don't frequent anywhere near the same ecosystem they would, but have never seen one, So from my point of view it is one person making releases for himself and I love that dedication. I don't have, nor do I want a luna88k, but it great that it exists.
So as far as I can tell that is all it takes to have a published obsd port, one person willing to put the work in.
I have a Lenovo laptop running OpenBSD 8.0.
What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!
I like OpenBSD, but I don't think this is a specific reason to appreciate it as any decent OS these days has been upgradeable release upon release safely for more than 2 decades, regardless if it is a linux distro, an Open/Net/FreeBSD system, a macOS or Windows system.
That's pushing the timelines a bit. I had more than one early Ubuntu completely hose itself on dist-upgrade pre 16.04, despite it being based on Debian for which such things have never been a problem for me. Until 22.04->24.04 my rule was always to reinstall as a result.
Zero configuration conflicts/issues the whole time?
I believe my current Fedora install started as a Fedora 26 so rougly 10 years without issues on 2 different laptops with same install?
On servers I have changed providers so it never lasted as long but at work we upgraded ubuntu LTS at least twice on same hardware.
Before Fedora I had similar experience with slackware, freebsd, openbsd and ubuntu on my daily drivers.
The only upgrade that ever broke a system of mine was my own fault by not reading news on archlinux website and upgrading blindly right when they were doing the changes with /bin /usr/bin. But Arch is different, it is opinionated and not expected to be free of human homework.
I agree that it's great but as an anecdote, I have an arch linux laptop i upgrade 1-2 times a year and it still works too, been that way since 2019 so went through major kernel upgrades without a hitch. Only thing that ever broke were nvidia drivers sometimes because it's an shudders OPTIMUS laptop. Last time I updated it, vibe coding wasn't widespread yet so I am wondering if new package versions will finally kill it if I were to upgrade it now
I have an old(mutters to self don't look at date then I will feel old... Oh god it's from 2012) lenovo laptop that is my daily driver for portable ops. I run openbsd on it and... well it's perfect. sleeps perfectly, radio works well, I understand the OS. I will be very sad when it dies.
I did just re do the heatsink compound, so hopefully it has many years left, but I worry about the fan.
>What I really appreciate about it is I started with OpenBSD 7.6. Using sysupgrade, I went through every release (and syspatch) and just now successfully upgraded to 8.0. It still works great!
This is table stakes. Debian has had this since, IIRC, 1999.
Well, I've used Fedora since 2024 on my laptop and it went through four or five major upgrades, never had an issue.
The release song is a banger, as always.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
Noticed that OpenBSD includes some really ancient versions of GCC and Binutils. Found this page (2021) explaining why:
https://www.cambus.net/the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/
Outdated since Clang/LLVM it's in base.
MP support for VMM/VMD is huuuuge.
I find it quite annoying that I have to have a monitor plugged in for the upgrade to work. Otherwise it reboots into the old version after downloading. Is this a common problem?
I have a similar issue, my router won’t reboot without a monitor plugged in to the hdmi port. Displayport worked fine during the installation. It was clever enough to not work with a dummy hdmi dongle either.
I have seen it, upgrades use a cut down kernel (bsd.rd) which doesn’t have the same graphics drivers.
You may find setting the console to serial works around it (set tty com0 in /etc/boot.conf).
Good job and much clearer release notes than the ones I was reading about recent Linux release by the way.. much more informative and better organised to understand the impact in practical terms. #BSD_hellyeah
When I read the Changelog I had to check if it was April Fools day. Is this a real OpenBSD release? Feels early. Also, many of those changes don't sound like real OpenBSD changes.
They come out approximately every May and October, and have for quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD#Releases
Thank you. Was just wondering because the items in the Changelog look.... LLMish. Not something I'd have expected from OpenBSD. On the other hand, it looks like they've done a bunch of improvements I'd have assumed they'd done years ago. I wouldn't blame them.
Haven't their changelog always looked like this? Both https://www.openbsd.org/50.html and https://www.openbsd.org/60.html looks much the same, shorter perhaps, but otherwise the same.
> Added Lua patterns(7) support for relayd(8) filter rules; improved glob(7) documentation.
> Added ECDSA support to the relayd(8) CA privsep engine.
These are really fantastic.
It would be cool if we could run this thing on Apple Silicon macs. I'm getting tired of MacOS and would love an alternative to Linux.
OpenBSD support M1 and M2 chips.
Anyone managed to get this running on a 2018 (Intel) Mac Mini? I tried 7.8 or 7.9, I forget which, not long ago and was flummoxed.
Have you tried
I haven’t. Has that worked for you?
Since 2010, every hurdle I have encountered booting FreeBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, and Linux on Apple's Intel Macintoshes has been overcome with rEFInd by Rodsbooks.
If you have one of Apple's Intel Macintoshes with a T2 security chip, you may want to do a search with ChatGPT through one of the free portals out there to boot something "foreign" to what Apple's secure boot with the T2 security chip already recognizes.
When putting together rootfs on top of what others would consider to be "complicated", reaching for rEFInd when I should probably have run a small PXE server off a Pi did speed things up. rEFInd has been a good general purpose bootloader, simple tool.
In my aged existing familiarity with rEFInd, its docs may not spoon feed you the answer but if you know what you're looking for and what you want to do can be done, you'll find it.
The upgrade from 7.9 to 8.0 went completely smooth on a bastion host I have running with openbsd; from start to finish it took about ten minutes. Kudos to the team!
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade80.html
tl;dr - doas sysupgrade, system updates itself and reboots, doas sysmerge, doas pkg_add -u.
best part is, no systemd
Has anyone good luck with OpenBSD on Intel Macs?
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>Switched ssh(1) from supercop ed25519 to libsodium
Lol. Casually switching crypto implementation somewhere in the footnotes.
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/10/06/2
> * All: switch the fallback implementation of the ed25519 signature algorithm used when libcrypto is disabled from SUPERCOP ed25519 to libsodium. The libsodium implementation includes a number of strictness checks over the original reference implementation we have used to this point and a more ergonomic API.
like a virus, slop will infect the techsphere, and it will become a real pain in the bollocks to siftt thru the mountains of semi-slop just to get to the real, reliable and human-made stuff.
Reliable human stuff? Holy shit, I want whatever you are smoking.
I'm smoking natural gas to move the turbine that generates electricity so an overpriced GPU filled up with overpriced memory can give an interesting answer to this post :)
Wait... I thought you were one??!!!
> Reliable human-made stuff
My guy.......
Humans make predictable mistakes, AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Hallucination occurs where you least expected for ANY reason. Can you say the same about humans? Unless the human in question is mentally ill.
The loudmouths who think I'm wrong are simply not sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work. It's just pattern-matching and heuristics-based at that. The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's meh.
> The day AI produces a painting like a famous human painter, I'd be impressed.
What does "like" mean to you here?
> "I'm sophisticated enough to realize how LLMs actually work"
> "AI is unpredictable"
*thumbs up emoji*