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OpenBSD 6.8 released (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary)

148 points| job | 5 years ago |openbsd.org

33 comments

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[+] peatmoss|5 years ago|reply
As an occasional OpenBSD user since the early-ish days in the late 90s, this makes me feel old.

Congratulations on the release and for staying true to your vision all these years. OpenBSD still feels like an old friend from the moment I see that blue color on my console. Here’s to 25 more.

[+] kelp|5 years ago|reply
I still kind of miss the CD releases. I bought every release from 2.3 to somewhere in the 4.x series, and had them all in a closet until a few years ago. Unfortunately I got rid of them in a fit of cleaning.

I regret it now. Since then I’ve gotten back into OpenBSD as an occasional user on a random server here and there, and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6. I bought it specifically for OpenBSD and it works great.

Those old CD sets were cool. Many included extra art work, song lyrics, install instructions and would boot and install for several architectures.

These days I mostly just run current snapshots, so a release has little impact for me personally. But it’s always fun to see OpenBSD still moving forward after 25 years.

[+] crehn|5 years ago|reply
This reminds me of when you could order free Ubuntu CDs.
[+] ainar-g|5 years ago|reply
> Added support for set -o pipefail to ksh(1), potentially helping error checking.

I thought that that was a POSIX feature, and it was weird of OpenBSD's ksh to not have it, but apparently "-o pipefail" is not in POSIX[1]. Interesting!

Either way, congratulations to the OpenBSD team!

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

[+] jsiepkes|5 years ago|reply
Interesting: Added wg(4), an in-kernel driver for WireGuard VPN communication.
[+] 0ld|5 years ago|reply
When it was added to current, I've even sysupgraded to snapshot just to test it. The setup is very straightforward, clean and easy, just like OBSD in general
[+] zx2c4|5 years ago|reply
Yup! Pretty exciting indeed. Now OpenBSD has first class support for WireGuard, out of the box. And all the usual tools such as wg(8) and wg-quick(8) work too.
[+] moralsupply|5 years ago|reply
I wonder what's the current state of desktop on OpenBSD
[+] vidoc|5 years ago|reply
The ps/2 mouse driver is now extremely stable!
[+] kelp|5 years ago|reply
Gnome and KDE are in the ports tree and kept very up to date. Everything there basically works. Most supported hardware just works out of the box with very little tinkering.

Of course there is less hardware supported than Linux and support can lag a bit, since there are few people writing drivers. But modern Thinkpads work quite well.

All that said, I have found Gnome to feel a little slow on OpenBSD compared to running on on the same hardware on Linux. So on OpenBSD I mostly use dwm, which feels super fast.

Generally most everything you want can be found in the ports tree.

[+] mrweasel|5 years ago|reply
That depends on what you do to be honest. Web, email, programming, spreedsheets, wordprocessing have been fine for over a decade. Heavy 3D stuff, not my first, second or third choice.
[+] Panino|5 years ago|reply
This is my favorite release since 5.5, and is the codebase that finally pushed me to start running -current. Thank you OpenBSD developers!

2020 sucks and I feel so fortunate to WFH managing things that run on OpenBSD. If you're doing alright, please consider donating:

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

[+] cnst|5 years ago|reply
Time flies. I still remember starting with OpenBSD in early noughties, I think 3.5 and 3.6 in 2004, which seemed like a mature and exciting project at that time already; fast-forward 2020, and it's amazing how far we've come. Great to have been part of it, another 25 years now!
[+] doublepg23|5 years ago|reply
I have been using OpenBSD the past few months/weeks on less common architectures (loongson and macppc). It’s taught me a lot and will enjoy updating to the new release!
[+] tharne|5 years ago|reply
OpenBSD is a great project. The OpenBSD team isn't obsessed with pleasing everyone or getting mass adoption. They just focus on building a great OS for folks who appreciate that sort of thing. They know what they're about and that's why they've made it 25 years and will be doing their thing for another 25 years or more.
[+] arexxbifs|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if the simpleaudio driver means there's now support for sound over HDMI?
[+] brynet|5 years ago|reply
Unrelated, this is an arm64 thing.