My desktop comparison of FreeBSD and OpenBSD

free-and-bsd said:
Maybe HAMMER fs is also good, but the docs from the dragonfly bsd left me with the feeling that the installation process is not as straightforward there
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A common opinion is DragonFly has the most straightforward installation process. I'm wondering what documentation you are reading ...

, and that less ports would be available. Neither could I find a lot of information on that.
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23,200+ ports. Yes, that is less than FreeBSD, but surely useful?

And I don't have enough time to do all the testing...
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It might be better not to mention DF in a topic with "FreeBSD and OpenBSD" in the name if not fully informed I guess.
 
marino@ said:
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It might be better not to mention DF in a topic with "FreeBSD and OpenBSD" in the name if not fully informed I guess.
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Yes, sure. It's just that I thought it fitting to ask those who did mention it as they appear to know more about it. That is, my statement was rather a question and I thank you for answering it in a satisfying way ;). I'll give it a try then.

As yes, no mistake in my words: I don't have the time to do all the testing -- nobody does, I think, that's why this forum exists, that's why we have to rely on experiences of others to decide whether we even want to make steps in this or that direction at all. So there's no violation of the forum rules in those words of mine, I hope you'll see it that way :)
 
I like OpenBSD for its "solid" kind of feeling it gives me right from the start (installation, that is). I LOVE the default fvwm configuration you find yourself with after the base install -- actually I've borrowed that config as a basis for my own one.

GPT support is there now, but one needs to be careful during the installation while installing on anything else than a full-disk GPT partition. Finally I've figured out the way to install OpenBSD on a GPT partition without having it overwrite the whole disk GPT table (in case you're installing on a GPT multiple-partitioned disk). And still, it will only agree to install on a GPT partition that's 2nd and is preceded by a EFI system partition.

The next thing I like is the /etc/hostname.if NIC configuration feature. And PF, of course.

But I have this problem with the KMS X driver for Intel Graphics (on my Lenovo T61): once I log out of the X session the screen goes considerable darker and remains so. Does that happen only on some hardware, or is this the way the driver behaves in general? Currently I'm on OBSD 6.0. FreeBSD has solved this problem quite some time ago and you can log in and out of X as many times as you wish without your screen visibility being affected.

I've been able, following an on-line tutorial, to make a USB pen-drive based OBSD system (all mounted read-only + tmpfs for writing) containing all the software one would need for a gateway|firewall|whatever machine. Not possible with FreeBSD because it needs a swap partition.

...And lastly, OpenBSD precompiled packages seem to be much better than those for FreeBSD. At least, a couple of years ago I wasn't able to use some precompiled packages on FreeBSD and since then I've always built stuff from source. Not so on OpenBSD.
 
marino said:
It might be better not to mention DF in a topic with "FreeBSD and OpenBSD" in the name if not fully informed I guess.
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Fair enough.
Well, since the evaluation of the advantages of DF requires the exact knowledge of what they are (my simple installation & setup experience didn't discover any), it would be good to know more about them.
Its HAMMER fs has been mentioned as one of them. So is HAMMER2 now in a good enough state to compete, at least to some degree, with the more mature ones, like ZFS, for example? The latest posts I could find with googling date back to January 2015, but the home page has HAMMER2 related updates of 2017/03/14.
 
client said:
By home page you mean the digest (justin's blog)? And if so, what makes you think the update is hammer2 and not hammer1 related?
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Yes, his digest. What I consider the project's "home" page redirected there, so why should I not consider it as part of the home page itself?

GitHub, on the other hand, is not very specific (i.e. it says nothing) about stability, overall usability and other general information one may be first interested in before he decides whether spending more time on it is even worth his while -- even if he's a developer.

And yes, the discovered bug seems to be related to HAMMER, after all. But this is just what I meant: there is little information, unlike the case of OpenBSD etc.
 
free-and-bsd said:
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But I have this problem with the KMS X driver for Intel Graphics (on my Lenovo T61): once I log out of the X session the screen goes considerable darker and remains so. Does that happen only on some hardware, or is this the way the driver behaves in general?
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Update: it seems to be some misunderstanding between the driver and the laptop hardware. The darkening of the screen after logging out of an X session is easily cure by using the laptop's Fn key for the changing of the screen brightness.
 
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