[liendolucas]

What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard.

I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it.

I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports.

Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.

[sigio]

Top on linux shows kernel threads (all the processes in square brackets), on BSD it doesn't show these afaik. A fresh debian install only lists a handfull of processes (all the expected ones, ssh, systemd, ntp, gettys etc) besides the 200+ kernel-threads.

[BSDobelix]

>on BSD it doesn't show these afaik

Your right, you can show the system-processes in top with Shift+S, threads with Shift+H

[liendolucas]

Uh, ok then. I always thought that those were actually real kernel processes. What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Is it possible to renice them?

[hsjdjdbsbsjshsg]

Openbsd has been my router for a decade... I have a ansible playbook that does everything I need... I use a cheap USB drive in a fanless computer the only failure has been the $9 USB drive

[president_zippy]

If I had a nickel for every time my OpenBSD buddies told me "your ASUS router is not secure, just configure an OpenBSD machine as your router", I'd have a lot of nickels.

The part they never tell me is what hardware they recommend for the Wi-Fi, or rather which devices have OpenBSD driver support and allow for at least 4-5 good connections over 802.11ac?

I'm all for it, I just don't know where to start on the hardware.

[assimpleaspossi]

>>I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks

I believe you meant "bhyve".

[liendolucas]

Yeap, actually I haven't run directly `bhyve` but using the `vm` wrapper as is very convenient.

I haven't looked at passrhrough yet, but I do feel that if I need to use it I would probably have to fight a bit with it, anyone had a hard experience setting it up?

[saagarjha]

Nah the h is needless bloat

[nine_k]

While at it, a good minimalistic Linux could be Void Linux, which has several BSD folks on the team. I'm running it for about 7 years, and am happy with it. Unlike BSDs though, it's a rolling release, so I get fresh packages a few days after an upstream release.

[pyuser583]

Arch Linux is the closest I've seen to BSD in the Linux-verse. I recommend trying it. I'm not sure about production though, or using more exotic things like CUDA.

[lproven]

> Arch Linux is the closest I've seen to BSD in the Linux-verse.

It really isn't. The BSDs are smaller and cleaner, especially OpenBSD, which is positively minimal. Arch is huge.

The closest Linux to OpenBSD is probably Alpine, of all those I've seen. Takes as much disk as most modern distros take RAM, and because of no glibc and no systemd, a tonne of familiar Linux tools aren't available or don't work... just the old fashioned Unixy stuff... which is very much how running a BSD feels.

[sprash]

This was true before they switched to systemd. Now the pstree and mounts are as polluted with noise as any other distro.

[raskelll]

The closest to OpenBSD in the Linux-verse clearly is Void Linux.

[BSDobelix]

>and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again

Same here, i had dualboot Arch/FreeBSD for some years, but i just don't need that arch install i just stayed in FreeBSD and for games i have a bhyve Win11 VM (with GPU Passthrough) and that's all i need.

[sharts]

The BSDs seem to have their own fragmentation as well. All targeting their own niches and somewhat overlapping work. For example or ZFS or virtualization technologies that aren’t cross-pollinated easily.

Like, it’d be cool to have zfs on openbsd, etc. But you can’t easily mix and match.

At least on the linux side you can usually fit something into a different distro if you wanted without an insane level of effort.

[lproven]

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/ZFS-on-OpenBSD