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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Ive tried a BSD laptop before, and my concerns always boil down to the same nonsense...can anyone offer some advice?:

- how do i read ext4/fat/etc usb sticks from coworkers. - is 3d or video support good with AMD? - soundcard and full disk encryption? what about EFI boot?

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- reading ext4 is possible but hard (OpenBSD doesn’t support journaling filesystems); you’re better off with ext2 or FAT - video support with AMD GPUs is good, much better than NVIDIA - OpenBSD has a good sound stack that supports most audio systems - full disk encryption is easy to set up and mentioned in the article - UEFI and GPT work wonderfully on recent versions

What's the reason for missing journaling file systems? Lack of developers? Design choice for code simplification? Security reasons? Or something else?

I guess the same as with support for, say, NTFS, plus less incentive to work on it, since it’s less popular.

Similar with FreeBSD (use geli for encryption) and I believe ext4 read support works now.

Is there FS-wrapper support on OBSD?

NetBSD can read ext3/4 with a puffs filesystem driver... these days it can support ext4 extents natively as well, just not journalling.

Puffs is the NetBSD version of FUSE, and there is even a FUSE-to-puffs adapter so you can mount FUSE filesystems under NetBSD.

SO does OpenBSD with FUSE, and with NTFS you have ntfs-3g in ports.

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