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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> I am not on board with the graphic, whatever the heck it is.

They are purposefully iconoclast with whatever aesthetics are "socially acceptable" for mainstream nerds. For example, their use of comic-sans in official presentations. Here they use ridiculous slop in front of an audience of conservative unix hackers. You can find it funny with the right mindset.

The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years :

    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to your machine
    doas sysupgrade     # will log you out, go drink some coffee
    ssh myopenbsdbox    # log-in to the upgraded machine

    doas sysmerge       # (optional) solve merge conflicts of your cfg files
    doas pkg_add -u     # (optional) upgrade local packages

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Don't forget: doas syspatch. They tend to find some minor issues rather quickly after release.

Since I maintain my own custom patch set under OpenBSD, this is also usually when I need to vendor in the new release and update all of my patches.

Yup. I have heard the siren call. I’ll be putting it on an old fanless sbc router I have that is just sitting around since I upgraded.

What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

I use a custom dwm.

> What window managers is everyone running? I’m thinking i3 or dwm

everyone is running different managers... I use evilwm on linux and cwm on openbsd. They are very similar (keyboard-driven, floating windows with no frames) with different default keybindings.

> The upgrade mechanism from 7.9 to 8.0 is still gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years

The upgrade mechanism on a typical Linux distribution is _even more_ gloriously simple, and exactly the same as it has been for many years.

  # Fedora/RHEL
  $ sudo dnf upgrade -y

  # Debian/Ubuntu
  $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

  # Arch Linux
  $ sudo pacman -Syu

The false distinction between the OS packages and user local (/usr/local) packages during upgrade causes much unneeded complexity. FreeBSD is making this go away which is welcome.

    # Debian/Ubuntu
    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

But this is equivalent to syspatch && pkg_add -u , this does not upgrade the computer from one version of the OS to the next.

For a rolling release like Arch Linux you just always use pacman -Syu.

But yes you are correct, if you want to upgrade a Ubuntu distribution like 26.04 you do need to issue a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade` which is admittedly an additional command. But then you could run 26.04 for many years. In OpenBSD anytime the base system/kernel is upgraded for a security fix or point release you need to do a slightly more complex dance.

> a command like `sudo apt dist-upgrade`

That is still wrong.

The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.

So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.

The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.

It's a big job.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...

Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.

I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.

I'm pretty sure it takes more to move debian 11 to debian 12 and Arch doesn't even have versions

Arch upgrades are really fun if you don't run pacman for a year or more. It rarely works in your favor to not run pacman on a extremely frequent schedule.

A typical Debian upgrade process is more involved than that.

Hey, you'd love this one:

  guix pull && guix system reconfigure

To undo, it's:

  guix roll-back

(now, where is guix-bsd?..)

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Upgrading-Gui...

And don't forget to cross your fingers so the upgrade does not break your system... like what happened to me when systemd came out.

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