Hi all, this is about my experience with OpenBSD 6.5. Now, so
far I've only spent 15 hours according to my uptime using it.
That's really not much, but so far it's been a great 15 hours!
First, lets get to what's new/different.
What's new is that you can no longer login to Xorg by simply mak-
ing a .xinitrc file, writing down what window manager you want to
use in it and using the startx command. I assume it's the same for
every other window manager type as well, even with their own start
methods. I traditionally use jwm, as it's simple and distraction
free for me. I have it installed, but I wanted slightly more this
time, so I opted for XFCE. After installing XFCE, I tried the
startxfce4 command, and... it didn't work. It said something about
setiud I believe. So I checked the FAQ on Xorg on the OpenBSD site
and it indeed was changed. Now you have to go through XenoDM, which
is OpenBSD's customized version of Xorg with more security enhance-
ments. So after finding the correct xfce login command and pairing
it with XenoDM, everything went smoothly. So yeah, somewhat of a
big change.
Next was the wireless detection. During the install it picked up
my wireless card, and not even FreeBSD or the previous version
of OpenBSD had support for it, so this was a welcome surprise.
It was easy to configure, and given that I use a desktop, I won't
be moving it around to different access points. I've heard that
there are scripts out there that make it easy to reconfigure
OpenBSD for different access points, but I haven't given it a
real look.
Next we'll take a look at packages. They have everything I personally
need, such as mpv, ranger, firefox, thunderbird and a host of others.
The only thing I've found disappointing is that VLC is not up to
version 3.x, whereas on FreeBSD it was just updated to that. On
my laptop I am currently using Ubuntu, mainly just for the software
support. I hope one day I can run OpenBSD on it, but currently it
doesn't support my laptop's wireless card.
Now if you're new to OpenBSD, it's relatively easy to install
despite the fact that it has a text-only installer. It's not
too bad at all! Getting packages can be a pain if you don't
install via http, since if you install through that method
OpenBSD will remember where you got the base installation
and it will where to find packages for it. Once that's done
all you have to do is pkg_add your way to victory! I got
everything I needed in about less than 10 minutes and I
was up and rolling. As far as what makes it different
from Linux, is that I feel that I know how everything
meshes together and works, like Tetris blocks. You have
the traditional initd, which can be controlled via the
rcctl command to add or remove daemons, start and stop and
so forth. You have ifconfig to control networking. You have
PF for firewall. For virtual machines, you have vmm(virtual
machine monitor). It's all very straightforward in OpenBSD.
As far as what I'd rate this release in comparison to others
- I'd say a nice 9/10. The only reason it's not 10/10 is
because XenoDM could be a bit tough for newbies. Other than
that, I say jump right in!
