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Comment by temprature | Hacker News Reader

Do you have examples of what in OpenBSD you found "utterly complicated to setup and use"? I've been using for several years now because of how devoid of complexity it is and because of how comprehensive the documentation is. Trying to even install other Unices nowadays frustrates me to no end because they're more complicated than "just keep pressing enter".

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The first time I installed OpenBSD I didn't know what to enter as "host name", nor that I needed to make a hosts file entry for whatever I chose.

Another example might be when startx stopped working for non-root users - a "change / why / what to do now" explanation would have been handy.

But OpenBSD isn't aimed at Unix newbies so it's entirely understandable why that level of hand-holding doesn't exist.

Non of those things are OpenBSD specific, though I’m not sure what the hosts file thing is about.

Well, for one thing, setting up FDE was way harder that it should probably be for "the most secure os on the planet".

Also, I installed Kubuntu the other day, and I just kept pressing enter.

There was even a checkbox for FDE.

I think it's the difference between being simple, and hiding complexity behind towers of abstraction. In my experience OpenBSD goes to great lengths to rethink systems and purge intrinsic complexity. By contrast, Linux tends to merge complexity behind meta interfaces.

OpenBSD's approach appeals to me aesthetically, and I like the feeling that I could easily dive in and get to the bottom of the stack. There is no magic.

By contrast, I look at Ubuntu as a hot mess of code that I'll never understand, while simultaneously appreciating that I can click through the installer after a cocktail or two and be playing games on Steam in short order.

the openBSD community is also very pragmatic in terms of backwards compatibility.

spending time make systems backwards compatible should be better spend making the path to using <newthing> as easy as possible, and a big help in that is keeping complexity down and not building towers of abstraction.

Really? It's just a few commands away, all of which are completely transparent and documented in the FAQ:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#softraidFDE

Granted it could probably be added to the installer, but that's hardly "Utterly complicated to setup".

Arguably it's a little weird that it's under "softraid", when you don't know that it's a feature provided by the softraid layer. It's easy enough to figure out after a bit of searching, but it's not the first place I'd look either.

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