While sysupgrade is convenient, there's usually some manual steps.

Always read the upgrade guide before upgrading.

"Intuitive" is often a code word for "familiar to me". A full-blown general purpose OS cannot be completely intuitive; the user always needs something to build from.

For what it's worth, I think OpenBSD is intuitive because of its consistency. It's certainly been more intuitive to me than any other OS; it just makes sense as a whole in a way that no other OS quite does, and that's refreshing in a world where users are expected not to understand what their tools are and how they work.

OpenBSD just builds its intuitive bits on things you may not yet know. Fortunately, it has excellent documentation to get you started.

Don't take this as argumentation against what you're saying, because it makes a lot of sense. However, I would love for my phone or Mac to at least have the option of reading the documentation, but it's not easily accessible. Some things a deemed so intuitive that it doesn't need documentation, yet I still can't use it or find it.

On OpenBSD, if you're stuck on something in ksh, cwm, pf or any other built in tool, the man page is right there. Easily accessible, easy to read and comprehensive. When I play around on my OpenBSD box, the man pages is often my first choice over a search engine.

Also, not confuse man pages on OpenBSD with Linux man pages. Those two are remarkably different. Many Linux tools have good and comprehensive man pages. On OpenBSD everything has great man pages.

You can still use search engines, but once you learn your way around the documentation, you might find it is more reliable and quicker.

To me, it seems worthwhile to have fewer 0-day bugs to worry about, and more reliable separation between user accounts (fewer privilege escalation bugs, etc etc). (I also recommend setting default umask to 0077 for the same reason, except while using pkg_add -- I have a wrapper script that undoes it temporarily for that due to issues encountered.)

There are reasons people use Windows or Apple (perceived convenience), and reasons not to (long-term cost/benefit decisions for known uses).

In case it becomes useful to anyone: One way to traverse the docs is (occasionally helpful) is using something like http://man.bsd.lv/ for OBSD docs, like putting in an "=" (w/o quotes) in the search field then clicking "apropos" shows all the commands -- a useful way to learn "what is available in the base system"; or doing full-text searches (can be learned locally, I have an awkward script for it if needed),

(Edit: s/what is available/what is available in the base system/ .)

And: I find the ~"only 2 remote holes in the default install since about 1996" to be very impressive.

Edit: Another way to look at it might be by priorities. I have come to see priorities of some systems roughly as:

OpenBSD: security, openness, correctness (including of documentation), portability.

Linux: features, performance, openness, breadth of everything, compatibility, convenience (distributions vary in specifics of course; debian and/or devuan continue to impress me in their own way).

FreeBSD: performance, stability, openness.

NetBSD: portability, stability?, maybe enjoyment for its developers, openness. (I know least here.)

Windows / Apple: profitability while targeting preferences of specific groups who want different specific kinds of convenience, it seems.

If you used Linux for any amount of time it'll take a couple of days to get familiar with OpenBSD and they you will be more at home with it than Linux.

To me OpenBSD is similar to what Slackware was, as simple as it possibly can be, with the advantage of a BSD being coherent and consistent.

I'm a long time Linux user and only used OpenBSD recently. I often find myself Googling Linux configs. I did use Google for OpenBSD to get started but found after a day I wasn't and relying on the man pages instead for system settings etc. They really are short, concise and complete, everyone says this but until you use them it's hard to understand.

I use Emacs I don't know Emacs. Emacs is a completely different beast to OpenBSD. Emacs is a huge rabbit hole and you spend as much time building your own Emacs as you do using Emacs. OpenBSD i've set up once which was simple as someone never using it before, and then forgot about it. It's been sat ticking away in a corner, no interruptions.

As much as I really like OpenBSD I don't think I can use it as a primary desktop. There's a few compromises on hardware support, no docker for my day job and I've read the desktop experience is slower than Linux just because it hasn't had the money and people Linux has had with drivers etc.

I'd really recommend anyone try OpenBSD for it's simplicity and educational purposes. If you use it as your main OS you will likely be dissapointed with some of the limitations, as a server / secondary educational device you might be pleasantly surprised.

I too have the nixos vs openbsd decision nibbling at me every time I spin something up.

Here's what helps me decide: I simulate a disaster. Since I'm just me, I do it on paper (empirical ways are best but are also the most expensive, and in a pinch, a thought experiment can illuminate as well. Not always the same things, but light is light.)

Try it -- open a scratch.txt and write about things that would happen, and then the things that would probably happen as a result of that.

The one that often comes up for NixOS is "I lose network connectivity." While NixOS is phenomenal in its ability to roll changes back, the fact that I need a stable Internet connection in order to make any change whatsoever to the current config makes that little piece of CAT-8 a SPOF for any number of unexpected (and intuitively unrelated) matters, making the overall system hard to reason about.

You can mitigate this by hosting your own NixOS channels, which is sort of the equivalent of hosting your own apt-get repo.

But, as you might expect, that's actually a fair amount of extra work. So I don't, especially not on laptops, where space can (still) be limited.

So, every time I do `home-manager switch` I need a viable network connection.

This is especially galling if you (like me) manage most of your apps with Nix' `home-manager`. Think it through; Nix manages (say) your word processor; you want to change the font size in your word processor; you edit your home.nix and hit `home-manager switch`.

But look at what this entails! My apartment building's fibre-optic cabling should never be a depenency on altering the font size in my word processor, but here I am. Ironically, for the sake of convenience.

Now, none of this is to slag on NixOS. As I mentioned above, it's my favourite way to encounter reality. I'm typing this to you on NixOS right now. For me, the pros outweigh the cons. Provided, of course, I have something less brittle than NixOS to back me up, and for me, that means OpenBSD.

I have an OpenBSD instance in the cloud and a break-glass procedure for getting into it. It backs up via another old-school friend, tarsnap. It hosts the git repos that contain my nixos and home-manager configs. If I can talk to it, I can simply zap my NixOS config onto some new edge device and be back up and running in no time.

I also typically have a NUC running OpenBSD present as well, in case that apartment-building fibre gets troublesome (again,) but not at the moment, because my beloved PCEngines device has apparently become unstable under any OS. But when I get that OBSD NUC set (back) up, it will absolutely have a NixOS channel on it, and it will serve as a firewall, a SAN, serving NixOS channels to the edge devices. It will have an actual serial port and a password on a wax-sealed bit of paper in my fireproof safe. Because I think ahead, and that's what I need to get back up and running under the worst circumstances.

I simply can't imagine a non-hardware-failure disaster that could take out an aggressively boring OpenBSD bastion instance. They are just relentless in their persistence.

As I keep saying, NixOS and OpenBSD pair together like honey and mustard. Contrastive but unexpectedly delicious.

Take-home: If you're building infra, try adding some OpenBSD to the mix. It can make the unrecoverable recoverable.

I find each Linux OS that’s based around a different package manager to generally feel like a different operating system. That’s my point.

The BSDs all have a common ancestor. The Linux’s tend to all have a GNU user space, the kernels are mostly the same, but the OS layout tends to differ in important ways.

Is Debian a different OS from Redhat?

*its

Scores are one thing, using it is another.

I ran OpenBSD on a Thinkpad T450 for over a year, but recently switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, not because of lack of speed, but some missing applications and blutooth support.

Given I don't run a heavy desktop environment, rather just StumpWM, but still I did not in any way feel OpenBSD was slower than Linux, using the same applications.

OpenSUSE is the most solid Linux I have used so far, but OpenBSD was more to my liking setting up and maintaining. It is well thought out, simple, and... just makes sense.

OpenBSD has way better ACPI, power management, and less setup hassle than FreeBSD, and way cleaner and nicer out of the box than any linux distro. You don't generally have to hack on anything to get basic laptop functionality working, and the small loss of performance from mitigations, disabling SMT, etc. is really not as big a deal for me, because my laptop is used for ssh and web browsing, not compiling huge projects or playing games.

It depends on where you fall in trade-offs. OpenBSD also tend to be proactive in security and will choose security over performance enhancements. FreeBSD aims for performance. If you need a super performant desktop that is running a BSD flavor, FreeBSD is the choice. If your focus is having a secure desktop, OpenBSD is probably more up your alley. It is the age old question, you want speed, quality and quantity, but you can only choose 2, so which 2? Neither is a lesser system, they just have different priorities. For BSD, I have a preference for NetBSD, mostly because I value portability. I can take pksgrc and use it on my MacOS machine or my Linux box.

If you cared about actual security, you would use it in a laptop thanks to bioctl and full disk encryption.

...and that ksh descended from pdksh, and is distributed as the oksh portable project here:

https://github.com/ibara/oksh

The MirBSD Korn Shell also descended from pdksh, and it can be found here:

http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm

I don't know about the feature differences and code quality between these two; they both implement most of ksh88, and a small amount of ksh93.

I prefer mksh when I need something more than a POSIX shell.

Yes, absolutely true. The idea is that `ksh` is good enough, and the extra features of bash are extraneous or unnecessary, making it an add-on rather than a core feature.

It's an interesting idea, and while I feel bash is absolutely 'good enough' to be part of the base system, I wouldn't want zsh or fish part of my base system - so it's then a matter of opinion whose shell is bloat and whose is essential. So I respect their decision to not include bash in the base image - it's meant to be uncompromisingly lean and simple.

Reason for my switch was that some key things (for me) were designed in a way that seemed more right that on linux and this is totally subjective opinion.

I am still running ubuntu on laptop and will switch when the next install is a thing, but I am running freebsd on server for years now and while i tremble on each update for the laptop, I dont for freebsd, even when updating from 12.x to 13.x.

Based on years of experience on both operating systems. I was surprised only once when freebsd made change where the base network settings weren't by default copied into fibs (you wont encounter this... probably ever) and even then I needed an hour to figure what the change was.

On the other side, I no longer count the nasty surprises the linux distributions played on me (like /etc/resolv.conf being overwritten by systemd resolv, just as trivial change). My laptop is unbootable for a year as they messed something regarding the order of zpool import (bpool being imported before rpool - probably a race condition) so i have to import it manually or it doesnt boot, while I have freebsd zfs root for ~10 years and it never failed me.

Details like that made me insecure about linux. And on the other side, made me highly secure about freebsd.

I think that (again, this is subjective, speaking only for myself)...

I... trust... BSD... guys. Based on experience.

I... dont trust linux... distributions. Based on experience.

But it might just be me.

It made me switch from Linux.

If it doesn't sound compelling to you, that's okay too, Linux is great. But I do think focusing on the consistency of design really is the best high-level summary of the difference between Linux and OpenBSD.

When things are consistent, less mental effort goes into remembering arbitrary differences.

Arch was the most BSD-ish when I tried it a few years back

ooc why didn't you try NetBSD? Isn't running on every little device kinda their wheelhouse?

What simple text file is, for example, the list of WiFi SSIDs to try to connect to stored in?

How are remote updates in Ubuntu configured by text file under systemd?

>OpenBSD split from NetBSD years ago for political reasons.

I was naive in thinking it was always about the focus on priorities, as in Security vs NetBSD's portability. So I decided to read up on it [1]. Since Wiki seems to be purposely quiet / unclear on the incident.

Turns out Open Source Politics isn't that much different 25 years later.

[1] https://www.theos.com/deraadt/coremail.html

So run Rocky or Alma? They're both binary compatible versions of RHEL8. If you're already used to the Enterprise Linux ecosystem, there's no point in switching away from it entirely just because of CentOS stream, unless you're just interested in trying something new.