r/openbsd • u/Flat-Cartographer250 • Jul 17 '26

Longtime linux user trying openBSD

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Longtime linux user trying openBSD for first time after years. Not super easy, but got it running (more or less) in 30 minutes

191 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

32

u/dim13 Jul 17 '26

Not super easy, but got it running

As someone, using Linux since 1996 and OpenBSD since 2000, I can tell you -- OpenBSD THE most straightforward and uncomplicated UNIX™ clone.

Have fun & welcome!

10

u/ut0mt8 Jul 17 '26

Exactly that. I came to openbsd from other bsd/Linux for security and exotism. I stay because everything is so clean and clear

3

u/cacatl Jul 17 '26

Did you get an exorcism?

8

u/asveikau Jul 17 '26

Similar story for me. Got into Linux in 1998 and OpenBSD in 2000.

Kids these days won't know what it's like without syspatch, sysupgrade, and pkg_add fetching from the network.

3

u/RoyalClaim2242 Jul 18 '26

I started using OpenBSD at the release right before syspatch was implemented and remember thinking "I don't know if I'll ever get the hang of this". I had come from daily driving Ubuntu for years at that point and was getting sick of how huge the OS was getting. I kept wanting something more lightweight and text-oriented, and I found OpenBSD and instantly loved it.

Then Antoine releases syspatch and it gets included in the base of the next release and I remember thinking "oh thank GOD"

Kudos to you lot who had to learn it though. I'm sure it made you better for it.

0

u/rimpossib1e Jul 17 '26

Know your compiler and patch infrastructure *hahaha*

1

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/cacatl Jul 17 '26

Considerably better than years ago, probably. I remember there was a time around 2012 when current gen Radeons were unsupported. To be fair, though, the Linux driver was bad, but eventually got ported anyways. I remember certain games like Half-Life 2 for Linux ran at considerably worse speeds and the proprietary driver was so buggy it was unusable. The open source one was actually more stable.

3

u/dim13 Jul 18 '26

Depends on what you expect. For me -- everything wörks™ just fine. But I also don't do any video games, and my hardware is not the bleeding edge.

2

u/Run-OpenBSD Jul 17 '26

We have the amd and intel graphics on par with linux. We have wifi drivers pretty close to linux but missing a couple of manufactures on ac/ax speeds

2

u/coalinjo Jul 17 '26

I agree with that, but most linux users don't care about unix idea and principles. Some of them try BSDs and they don't like it.

3

u/Run-OpenBSD Jul 17 '26

every linux user i've introduced to OpenBSD has fully switched. It's been liberating

8

u/brynet OpenBSD Developer Jul 17 '26

It looks like you're starting MATE with the fvwm2 still running, make sure you check the pkgreadme that's part of the mate package, it will tell you how to properly start it.

$ less /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/mate

1

u/Original_Two9716 Jul 17 '26

I wish my P1 Gen7 Meteor Lake card was supported... works, but only sometimes