[Flamingoat]

I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8.

It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.

The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.

It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.

[somat]

Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

[Flamingoat]

> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.

[ninjin]

It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.

[lproven]

> the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

Very hard disagree.

It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.

I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.

It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.

I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.

[assimpleaspossi]

>>The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.

For what it's worth, I've never been able to properly install Arch or Gentoo but I can install FreeBSD in 10 minutes.

[Flamingoat]

I haven't touched Gentoo in 20 years.

If you use archinstall as I said you can be up and running in 20 minutes on a fast connection. You literally just state what you want setup through a menu, make a hot drink and you have a working desktop. It is pretty hassle free in my experience.

I haven't tried the FreeBSD installer in a couple of years but I always find that I end up lost in the menus or something doesn't work correctly. Then I am kinda left faffing trying to get X working, ports or something else working. I couldn't set the desktop resolution properly and I suspect there was some magic flag I had set somewhere or install firmware.

I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.