But the biggest differential factor between BSDs and GNU/Linux is the way it is structured.

In Linux, all components are designed to work together, but are completely separate. You’ve got the kernel, init systems, multimedia daemons, userland, bootloader, virtualization and containerization mechanisms, package managers, and so on. They are all separate projects with their own goals and are operated by separate entities. This is why we’ve got different Linux Distributions instead of Operating System. Everyone can take the kernel, start adding components on top of it, and a few minutes later the DistroWatch is even harder to keep up with.

Each BSD on the other hand is designed as single system. All components are created and developed together. Things work together perfectly, because they are designed, coded, tested and released as one.

↫ Michał Sapka

As I’ve mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring the world of BSD lately, and after bouncing of FreeBSD I’ve found a very happy home on OpenBSD. Now, this doesn’t mean I’m now a full-time OpenBSD user or anything like that – Linux is the main operating system on my gaming PC, my laptop, and my workstation, and that’s not going to be changing any time soon. However, after installing, exploring, and using OpenBSD on a machine cobbled together from spare and older parts, I can definitely see the appeal.

OpenBSD feels more coherent than a Linux distribution – I use Fedora KDE, if that matters – and the various lower-level systems seem to talk to each other in ways that make more intuitive sense than the individually developed systems in a Linux distribution do. Diving into the command-line interface of a Linux distribution can sometimes feel confusing because different tools use different conventions, because they’re developed by entirely different people and projects, with different ideas about how flags should work, how output should be presented, and so on. On OpenBSD, it seems much easier to carry over something you learn from one tool to the next. I simply feel more secure and knowledgeable, even if it’s still the same idiot me.

The documentation plays a big role here. They’re in one place, written in a consistent style, and reference each other left and right, making it easy to find your way around to other commands or tools you haven’t yet considered using. On Linux, you’re going from one project’s documentation to another project’s documentation, and not only will the style change, the quality will also vary greatly.

That’s not to say everything’s perfect on OpenBSD – it’s clearly a hardened server operating system, and its focus on security will definitely throw up annoying hurdles if you’re just trying to do workstation things. Firefox, for instance, is hobbled by strict security rules through unveil, which makes perfect sense for what OpenBSD is first and foremost trying to be, but if you’re just a regular user like me, it’s annoying that Firefox can only access ~/Downloads, or that it can’t set itself as the default browser so unless you disable that check, Firefox will keep complaining about it. Diving into Firefox and unveil is on my list, though, because you should be able to ‘fix’ this.

Furthermore, while every piece of software, or an equivalent, is pretty much always available for Linux, on OpenBSD it’s more hit and miss, and it seems to take a bit longer for new releases of especially bigger software packages to get updated. I mean, there’s obviously no Steam on OpenBSD, but smaller, less well-known projects generally also don’t support OpenBSD, so you’re either going to be compiling things yourself or hope someone packages it up for OpenBSD.

Then there’s the various vanity things we’ve come to expect from modern Linux distributions, like slick, fully graphical boot and shutdown sequences, detailed graphical tools for managing your packages, graphical firmware and driver managers, and so on. OpenBSD has none of these things, and while that’s no issue for me, I can see how it would throw other people off.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the few others often kind of get lost in all the Linux, Windows, and macOS violence, and to be quite honest – I feel like many people in the BSD community seem mostly okay with that. If you’ve never spent any serious time using any of the BSDs, but you’re interested in operating systems and don’t mind spending a few hours learning how to manipulate your system through CLI tools – dive in. There’s a ton of fun to be had, and things to learn.

For now, I’m continuing my exploration of OpenBSD, and if things keep going as well as they are, I may consider at least switching over the workstation in my office from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD – but I highly doubt it’ll ever make its way to my gaming desktop or my laptop.

Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility.

Got is still under development; it is being developed on OpenBSD and its main target audience are OpenBSD developers.

Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always remain possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository.

↫ Game of Trees website

OpenBSD is developing Game of Trees because they want a version control system that adheres to OpenBSD coding conventions, implements various OpenBSD security practices, and uses nothing but BSD-licensed code. It’s important to note, as its developers make very clear, that GoT is not in any way intended as a replacement for git.

I always like it when I can link to an article written by an OSNews, and this time it’s even relevant to me as I’m exploring OpenBSD myself. OSNews reader and silver Patreon supporter Morgan has written an article about using OpenBSD as a daily driver.

OpenBSD is forever tied in first place with Void Linux as my favorite desktop OS. This is particularly funny because OpenBSD isn’t “just a desktop OS”; in its purest form, the base installation without any installed packages, it makes for an excellent Ethernet router, firewall, or web server. It even ships with its own fork of X11 called Xenocara, along with fvwm2 and its own calm window manager, so there’s a rudimentary desktop OS in there too. With that said, in 2024 there is no such thing as a fully functioning desktop computer or workstation without at least a web browser of some kind, and if you’re adding packages you may as well build a full desktop system to suit your needs.

So how do you go from the amazing but unfortunately limited base install to a “daily driver” workstation operating system? There are many ways to do this, and I will present a couple of paths I take depending on the hardware and use case involved. Before I do that, a bit of prep is necessary to get OpenBSD into more of a desktop OS mode.

↫ Morgan

I’ll be using this guide over the coming days to make sure I end up with something usable. I still haven’t decided on what desktop environment I want to go for – I’m not interested in running GNOME or KDE, so Xfce is probably the most likely option. I’d also love to try out LXQt, but it seems the version OpenBSD has in its repositories is very, very outdated (1.0.0 from years ago, when 2.0.0 was just released). There’s a small chance I might suck it up and use one of those “build your own desktop environment” options, but I have no idea which one I should go for.

With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.

While making these minor changes, I remembered how incredibly easy the entire install process for OpenBSD is and how cozy the entire operating system feels. All the core systems just work out the box. Yes, you need to “patch” in WiFi with a firmware update, so you’ll need an Ethernet connection during the initial setup. Yes, the default desktop environment is not intuitive or ideal for newcomers.

But the positives heavily outweigh the negatives (in my opinion).

↫ Bradley Taunt

OpenBSD has a very dedicated community, and I’ve noticed they tend to be very helpful and friendly. It’s making me curious about trying it out, and both this article and the helpful posts it links to will be a great way to start.

OpenBSD 7.5 has hit the streets (or servers and workstations), and it comes with a metric ton of improvements and new features. Of course, the kernel has been improved in countless ways, from symmetric multiprocessing improvements to a new font usable as a console font. The graphics drivers have been updated to match Linux 6.6.19, and drivers for the Apple display coprocessor were added. Furthermore, a whole slew of additional ARM boards and SoC are now supported, and new drivers for a variety of networking chips, both wired and wireless, were added as well.

Of course, that’s just a selection of the changes, and the full changelog lists them all for those of you with specific wishes.