On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 09:35:49PM +0000, jbranso@dismail.de wrote:
OpenBSD has the express goal of supporting ancient hardware.
OpenBSD and Debian share many ideals. We both believe in a secure, openbaseline for humanity to stop making the same mistakes. There are some differences; Debian places a huge emphasis on end-user freedom in a way OpenBSD hasn't historically, which, fine. We also share many upstreams (at least within ports). We even have some shared developers.
Debian has no corperate entity -- it's only people, working together. We have a few nonprofits that sponsor Debian resources in a few countries, but none are "Debian". OpenBSD is in similar shape. I respect that.
I have a few OpenBSD boxes at home. I ensure my software I write ports cleanly to OpenBSD (not any of the others, FWIW). I enjoy OpenBSD a great deal. I find it nice to work with.
I'm very envious of OpenBSD's ability to break ABI between releases as part of the explicit contract. I like the security features (pledge and unveil are very nice things to have), and I really like the hard work that goes into the OS. I've sent a few (fairly minor and not very important) patches to misc@.
The idea that OpenBSD would continue to support an old CPU at the expense of a meaningful security change is an interesting take. I would expect the reaction there to be "fix the broken arch" not "refuse the security change", which, isn't far off from where my perspective here is. I find the view that OepnBSD supports old CPUs at great expense hard to square with things like[1]. There are no doubt active porters within OpenBSD, as there are within Debian.
There is disagreement between OpenBSD's view on Rust's cost/benefit with a stable, reviewed and maintained C codebase and most of the rest of the industry, (and within apt) -- but again, that's not important here.
I see no reason that this fairly obvious trolling has any weight here. If folks are interested in OpenBSD for what it does (very) well, they should use it, not because of an implementation language (what a hot take).
paultag [1]: https://www.openbsd.org/i386.htmlDue to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on.
-- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Paul Tagliamonte <paultag> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ https://people.debian.org/~paultag | https://pault.ag/ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ Debian, the universal operating system. ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀ 4096R / FEF2 EB20 16E6 A856 B98C E820 2DCD 6B5D E858 ADF3
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