Why I stopped using OpenBSD

Author: Solène
Date: 15 November 2024
Tags: openbsd linux life

Introduction

Last month, I decided to leave the OpenBSD team as I have not been using OpenBSD myself for a while. A lot of people asked me why I stopped using OpenBSD, although I have been advocating it for a while. Let me share my thoughts.

First, I like OpenBSD, it has values, and it is important that it exists. It just does not fit all needs, it does not fit mine anymore.

Issues

Here is a short list of problems that, while bearable when taken individually, they summed up to a point I had to move away from OpenBSD.

Hardware compatibility

no Bluetooth support
limited game pad support (not supported by all programs, not all game pad will work)
battery life / heat / power usage (OpenBSD draws more power than alternatives, by a good margin)

Software compatibility

As part of staying relevant on the DevOps market, I need to experiment and learn with a lot of stuff, this includes OCI containers, but also machine learning and some weird technologies. Running virtual machines on OpenBSD is really limited, running programs headless with one core and poor performance is not a good incentive to work at staying sharp.

As part of my consultancy work, I occasionally need to run proprietary crap, this is not an issue when running it in a VM, but I can not do that on OpenBSD without a huge headache and very bad performance.

Reliability

I have grievances against OpenBSD file system. Every time OpenBSD crash, and it happens very often for me when using it as a desktop, it ends with file corrupted or lost files. This is just not something I can accept.

Of course, it may be some hardware compatibility issue, I never have issues on an old ThinkPad T400, but I got various lock up, freeze or kernel panic on the following machines:

ThinkPad X395
ThinkPad t470
ThinkPad t480
ryzen 5600X + AMD GPU (desktop)

Would you like to keep using an operating system that daily eat your data? I don't. Maybe I am doing something weirds, I don't know, I have never been able to pinpoint why I got so many crashes although everyone else seem to have a stable experience with OpenBSD.

Moving to Linux

I moved from OpenBSD to Qubes OS for almost everything (except playing video games) on which I run Fedora virtual machines (approximately 20 VM simultaneously in average). This provides me better security than OpenBSD could provide me as I am able to separate every context into different spaces, this is absolutely hardcore for most users, but I just can't go back to a traditional system after this.

Earlier blog post: Why one would use Qubes OS?

In addition, I have learned the following Linux features and became really happy of it:

namespaces: being able to reduce the scope of a process is incredibly powerful, this is something that exists in Linux since a very long time, this is also the foundation for running containers, it is way better than chroots.
cgroups: this is the name of the kernel subsystem that is responsible for resource accounting, with it, it is possible to get access to accurate and reliable monitoring. It is possible to know how much network, i/o, CPU or memory have been used by a process. From an operator point of view, it is really valuable to know exactly what is consuming resources when looking at the metrics. Where on OpenBSD you can notice a CPU spike at some timestamp, on Linux you would be able to know which user used the CPU.
systemd: journald, timers and scripting possibilities. I need to write a blog post about this, systemd is clearly disruptive, but it provides many good features. I understand it can make some people angry as they have to learn how to use it. The man pages are good though.
swap compression: this feature allows me to push my hardware to its limit, with lz4 compression algorithm, it is easy to get access to **extremely** fast swap paid with some memory. The compression ratio is usually 3:1 or 4:1 which is pretty good.
modern storage backend: between LVM, btrfs and ZFS, there are super nice things to achieve depending on the hardware, for maximum performance / reliability and scalability. I love transparent compression as I can just store more data on my hardware. (when it's compressible of course).
flatpak: I really like software distribution done with flatpak, packages are all running in their own namespace, they can't access all the file system, you can roll back to a previous version, and do some interesting stuff
auditd: this is a must-have for secure environments, it allows logging all accesses matching some rules (like when was accessed this arbitrary file, when that file is modified, etc...). This does not even exist in OpenBSD (maybe if you can run ktrace on pid 1 you could do something?). This kind of feature is a basic requirement for many qualified secure environments.
SELinux: although many people disable it immediately after the first time it gets on their way (without digging further), this is a very powerful security mechanism that mitigates entire classes of vulnerabilities.

When using a desktop for gaming, I found Fedora Silverblue to be a very solid system with reliable upgrades, good quality and a lot of software choice.

Conclusion

I got too many issues with OpenBSD, I wanted to come back to it twice this year, but I just have lost 2 days of my life due to all the crashes eating data. And when it was working fine, I was really frustrated by the performance and not being able to achieve the work I needed to do.

But as I said, I am glad people there are happy OpenBSD users who enjoy it and have a reliable system with it. From the various talks I had with users, the most common (by far) positive fact that make OpenBSD good is that users can understand what is going on. This is certainly a quality that can only be found in OpenBSD (maybe NetBSD too?).

I will continue to advocate OpenBSD for situations I think it is relevant, and I will continue to verify OpenBSD compatibility when contributing to open source software (last in date is Peergos). This is something that matters a lot for me, in case I go back to OpenBSD :-)