magda

The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. As an example of the effect OpenBSD has, the popular OpenSSH software comes from OpenBSD.

Experience tells me that any operating system introducing itself by highlighting its influence and listing a bunch of buzzwords, chances are high that the OS sucks and hardly fulfills any of its promises. It's especially noticeable among most Linux distributions based on Ubuntu, which effectively are just Ubuntu with a slightly modified desktop environment. Although BSD appears to be much less popular than the ecosystem that is Linux, there has been a minor wave of distributions based on FreeBSD that provide nothing but macOS-like desktop themes, as well (looking at you, helloSystem).

OpenBSD, however, has been around since 1995, initially being just a simple fork of NetBSD, a fork of both BSD and 386BSD. Being completely unfamiliar with BSD, I decided to take as little risks as possible and installed OpenBSD in a virtual environment only – as it would turn out, I made the right decision to not test it on bare metal.

Installation

OpenBSD prides itself with being easy to install and offering “a very usable default configuration with a minimum of user intervention”. Being presented with to install options, I chose to do a normal install.

As the installer asks questions, rather than expecting the user to do everything manually (looking at you, Arch!), some prompts really do not need much attention, though the first noticeable thing was IPv6 not being set to be automatically configured, despite IPv6 being on par with IPv4 in terms of potential loop holes. The installer also recommends to not start OpenBSD's default display manager, xenodm, automatically and does not actually want users to create a separate user.

One thing that pretty much screamed paranoia was the installer warning me that my password might be easy to guess – quite a bold claim, considering I did chose a password that cannot be easily guessed without knowing me better than my own mother. And I doubt that pubkeys really are less-risky than a cringy password I would never use outside of distribution tests.

Speaking of “cringy”: I really don't know what's supposed to be sane about OpenBSD's recommended partitioning scheme. I understand the benefits of creating a separate partition for /home and /usr, yet creating a partition for /usr and four additional partitions for specific directories within /usr did come off as somewhat useless to me.

Configuring the sets also required to move a little off-script due to the recommended settings causing the installer to loop until I skipped SHA256 verification.

Fortunately, downloading and installing the base system took less than two minutes.

Installed System

Booting the system took nearly a minute, making it slower than Windows 10 on my main machine with fast boot disabled. As expected, I had to enable and start xenodm manually and was provided a very bare bone display manager with no option to view or choose another session. Logging on sent me to OpenBSD's default desktop, which runs on a minimalist window manager called Fvwm. XTerm started automatically with every logon procedure, regardless of account type. Given that users do not have any root privileges by default, I largely used root to test OpenBSD and already got frustrated by its navigation. As an Openbox user, I am used to opening my window manager's menu by right-clicking on the desktop; Fvwm demands the opposite and is set to open the menu with left-clicking. Selecting another pre-installed window manager changed nothing.

Package Management

OpenBSD offers four tools to find and manage packages: pkg_add, pkg_check, pkg_delete and pkg_info. Executing pkg_add for the first time will set a mirror automatically.

Downloading Openbox, Tint2, and the Lumina desktop environment took considerably longer than on any Linux distribution I have tested, so far, the system seemingly preferring CLI tools such as neofetch and htop. And unlike Debian and Arch Linux, pkg does not list dependencies and also does not ask for extra confirmation before installing any package.

Performance

Speaking of performance: OpenBSD is the first distribution making neofetch and htop print vastly different system resource usage numbers. While neofetch claims that the OS is needing just 99 MB of RAM, htop, a very lightweight monitoring tool, claims that OpenBSD is using 649 MB of RAM. I don't know how both tools came to such vastly different results – and at that point I was getting more annoyed by the constantly glitching mouse pointer.

Other Annoyances & Documentation

As if an glitching mouse pointer wasn't enough, XTerm ships with a color scheme that's not just unpleasant to the eyes but only partially readable. This problem gets even more pronounced due to OpenBSD not offering any tool to adjust the screen resolution by default.

Things got really messed up when I found out that Exit only logs me out without providing any way to shut the virtual machine down. shutdown also does not actually shut the system down and instead repeatedly in restarts that, once done, would only load a shell environment.

To top it all, despite all the praise of OpenBSD users, documentation is largely limited to cryptic man pages that aren't provided for all base components such as the X window system. The FAQ on the project's homepage largely deals with the installation procedure, how to do few changes to X, a brief introduction to package management, setting up a network connection, and porting. No information regarding used init system, default applications, nothing even remotely similar to the extensive ArchWiki. And the only way to get in touch with the developers and other OpenBSD users is via mailing lists. Interestingly, the project provides no archives for any of the security-related mailing lists, which means that OpenBSD does rely on “security by obscurity” by not publicly disclosing security issues.

TL;DR

If OpenBSD were to represent a pseudo-scientific Enneagram type, it would be a 5w4: Eccentric and creative, yet also self-absorbed, boastful, and impractical. While the installation was exceptionally fast, the OS itself is a sluggish mess and its user base actually fulfills the “Arch user” stereotype much better than Arch users themselves. Most of the time, I was left with the feeling that the project does not even know what user base it is trying to target.

The only reason why OpenBSD appears to be more secure is due to hardly anyone actually using it. The vast majority of computer users run Windows, while a few millions use macOS and a popular Linux distribution like Mint, Ubuntu Red Hat/Fedora and (open)SUSE, respectively. Servers run almost exclusively on any Enterprise Linux flavor or distributions like Alpine. And if someone really uses BSD, it likely is FreeBSD, not OpenBSD. But even its supposed secure appearance has been challenged since a talk at the Chaos Communication Congress discussing the security of OpenBSD, in which it was revealed that a significant part of exploit mitigations are “useless at best and based on pure luck and superstition”.

But let's be real: The only data that's truly secure is the one you don't store on a digital computer in the first place; no one knows how to use analog computers nowadays.

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Hardware

Medion Akoya E4070 D

Processor: AMD A10–5700 APU @ 3.40 GHz

Display: Trinity (Radeon HD 7660D)

Memory: 4 GB RAM (3462 MiB)

Storage: 1 TB ST1000DM003-9YN162 (CC4G)

Network: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Control & Realtek RTL 8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter