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.
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
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;
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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 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 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?
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.
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.
I’ve used it on and off since about 1999. It certainly feels more like Unix than anything else.
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
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.
It lost one eye, but that's ok, it still has two left.
“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.
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...
Just as cringeworthy as the QT4 dance
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.
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.
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 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.
If your joke is to smear your face with shit, don't be surprised when people aren't laughing with you.
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.
To be fair, I'm reading it as satire of AI. So not liking it is kind of the point.
that's the point
They're just showing humility. Give them a break.
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.
Tell me tis not AI, cause it sure as hell looks like one.
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.
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.
The art is credited to yvaneht nioj, another simpsons reference.
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.
similar on the front page https://www.openbsd.org/index.html , "UNDSREA LREER"
it seems very much like social commentary.
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
It's like a pelican on a bicycle, but with social commentary.
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
OpenLSD, bicycle day edition?
> 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
I use a custom dwm.
> 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.
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...
I'm pretty sure it takes more to move debian 11 to debian 12 and Arch doesn't even have versions
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.
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 is clearly AI generated and that’s the message.
It's literally in the name
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.
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.
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.
GeFS is in the works. I hope it gets into the tree some day:
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260918115729
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.
Did they ever have a Linux 6.9?
A sixty-nine interupted by a period?
Oh you
Yes, all the way up to 6.19 in fact!
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 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.
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.
Well, I've used Fedora since 2024 on my laptop and it went through four or five major upgrades, never had an issue.
>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.
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.
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.
Here are some.
http://bluhm.genua.de/test.html
The release song is a banger, as always.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80
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?
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.
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
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*
>Switched ssh(1) from supercop ed25519 to libsodium
Lol. Casually switching crypto implementation somewhere in the footnotes.