Disklabels make it feel like OpenBSD is stuck in the 1970’s when it comes to disks. Full disk encryption is very clunky. You first need to create a soft-raid with one disk (don’t even think about having mirrored encrypted disks) and then apply the BSD disklabel on it.
My first install with an encrypted disk failed because I didn’t realize that the program to decrypt the disk is put directly into the MBR and has no way of loading the keymap used with the installer. It is just there to decrypt the disk and load the actual bootloader on the disklabel. After a good half hour of going nowhere, I finally realized that the passphrase for my disk contained a character I literally could not type and the only fix was installing the OS again.
The whole experience made me realize how great Linux LVMs actually are even if they require a basic kernel to read them.
This very much depends on your threat model and whether or not you are yourself a computer security expert (or willing to pay $$$ for the consulting services of one). For the vast majority of people, a privacy-focused commercial OS (macOS) is going to do far more to protect you against the realistic threats you’re actually likely to be hit by than anything you configure yourself. Getting security right is extremely hard and you can’t do it yourself better than the team of experts at a company like Apple.
And if you’re worried about the NSA, well:
Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. In summary, https:// and two dollars will get you a bus ticket to nowhere. Also, SANTA CLAUS ISN’T REAL. When it rains, it pours.
I still have a 2013 MacBook Pro which works really well except for the keyboard, where a handful of keys have stopped working and I have to use an external keyboard. I really just use it for photo storage and manipulation at this point.
I have a soft spot in my heart for OpenBSD: it was the first BSD I installed, on a Mac Quadra 700 with two NICs that I ran as a firewall/router for a few years before upgrading to a Sun SparcStation 20 again with two NICs. A guest made me shut down my network one night before he slept in the guestroom/computer lair because of the sound those spinning platters in the SparcStation made… He wasn’t invited back.
I painfully realized this back in the day when I installed a network sniffer or whatever it was. Yeah, stuff is going in and out all the time and if you’re qualified to sift through that and tell what’s legit and what’s not have at it but this slightly-savvier-than-average-but-not-a-BOFH found that it essentially breaks the internet, just like when you turn off scripting or cookies and tracking and suddenly the stupid TV Guide listings don’t work. The worst thing we ever did was allow that stuff to become common and innocuous so the average joe/jane has a mountain of garbage to sift through if they want to take control of their own security.
Imagine if, instead of having to throw away your $3k Macbook and buy an $800 laptop you could just fire up the terminal on your Macbook and have BSD already there, ready to go. Imagine if, out of the box, you could already use a wide variety of user friendly package management options to run a whole gamut of open source software on your Macbook. Imagine if, instead of $800 in extra hardware, you could just migrate your existing accessories like USB keys to USB-C connections, or even dual connections, without dongles.
That summary is truly odd. Is he a Linux user, or an OpenBSD user?
If he is an OpenBSD user, why?
OpenBSD is a perfectly sensible choice for your webserver, but there are so many better choices to install on your laptop.
Still, it takes allsorts.
This! I’m a few cables in, but I have my zsh, brew.sh, &c; most of the greatest hits I used on my favorite Linux distros are here too.
I bought a license to Little Snitch and it provides a lovely visual of where my software is sending packets around the globe, but I find it’s more a matter of morbid curiosity than proactive security at day’s end. I’m by no means qualified to sniff packets for what’s benign and what’s otherwise.
Seconded. Just switched to Mint 20 with cinnamon from Xubuntu with KDE earlier this week, and straight Ubuntu for over a decade before that.
If you want to give Linux a try, but have no prior experience- try a livedisk of Linux Mint.
All the software is free the only difficult thing is getting basic tech support for some things, but Mint and Ubuntu both have forums.
Aside from my backlight brightness keys not working in Linux, everything else including my 4K OLED touch-screen works in it, including with fractional scaling for 4k screens if I need it.
I have no understanding of why anyone uses a Mac unless they just absolutely love the aesthetic and have enormous amounts of money to pay for it.
Linux is a hell of a lot more full featured, and the major distributions are not too hard to learn.
I still keep a partition for Windows on the thing but only for cam software that only works in Windows, only because I don’t feel like dealing with Wine to simulate it in Linux.
I’m really a very basic Linux user and I got into it because it was easier to do Japanese input natively than in Windows 15 years ago when I really needed it daily. If I can do it anyone here can
yet another sign of the crumbling of America- more people believe fictional child abuse is happening in the physically non-existent basement of a pizza parlor and have a religion of idiocy around it then use Linux on the desktop.
It might be the year of the linux desktop after QAnon morons take over the country and eat everyone
It depends on what you want the WM to do. I’m using Awesome WM on Linux, and for me it’s irreplaceable due to it’s very keyboard-centric nature, well thought out shortcuts, window tiling (I have lots of terminals open), and 9 virtual desktops per every screen. I (and my friend who also uses it, he does weird stuff like photogrammetry and computational astrophotography) find it way more comfortable than Windows UI, but obviously it’s not for everyone. The learning curve is very steep, but once you get it managing lots of windows is way faster than on normal WMs.
It’s so odd that people consider Macs useful and easy to use. Whenever I see someone using one they’re either
furiously dragging windows around to find the app they want (because the window manager helpfully simulates a physical desktop of overlapping papers)
digging through folders for files they lost (because Mac apps helpfully pretend the file system doesn’t exist when they save), or
complaining how slow their laptop is (because the system helpfully installs bloated updates without asking you, and runs things in the background you didn’t ask it to do)
OpenBSD will continue to be updated for the next 25 years. IMO, there weren’t any useful or worthwhile UI developments in the last quarter century, and he’s made a fine choice. (My day to day tools were available in some form 25 years ago, and they still work fine, given that the inertia is for wasting programmer years on GUIs with poor expressiveness, I don’t expect to be using things much different from what I do now.)
Meh. Microsoft’s UIs have always been garbage. Maybe they are more unified, but that doesn’t make them good. You can get that unified feeling by drinking the gnome or KDE kool aid, but that still gets you a bloated UI that can only handle simple tasks gracefully.
(Why yes, I spend all my time on the command line, because it’s better in ways a GUI cannot match, and never will without a dramatic revolution in how they are built.)
Many years ago I used to run some fairly long and heavy jobs on a Thinkpad W510. It was pretty fast at the time, but it would get so hot it would be extremely uncomfortable as a laptop, and the heat killed my first battery in about 3 months.
