Trying OpenBSD

2024-04-17

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For the past several months my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 has been running Navigatrix NX, a Ubuntu derivative designed for use on boats. Navigatrix is pretty neat, but my 2010-vintage T410 is barely able to handle the load of the 2021-vintage OS: simply loading FireFox or attempting to sync a moderately-large Syncthing folder often causes the laptop to crash. I decided today to switch to something lighter and easier to manage, so I wiped the T410's drve and installed OpenBSD.

There's only one problem with my plan: I don't know much about OpenBSD. I briefly toyed with FreeBSD a few years ago when I first operated a gopherhole, but once I switched to hosting my small Web presence on Gemini, I moved back to Linux. All my other PCs use some flavor of Linux, and that's what I know and understand.

I want to learn OpenBSD, but there appear to be big differences in how (modern desktop-based) Linux distributions are managed and how OpenBSD is managed. Foremost among them, it seems, is how much configuration is purely based on plaintext configuration rather than using TUI tools. That means I need to understand full configuration files much more thoroughly than I do now--and that's a challenge, considering that I'm using a number of different tools that I would on Linux. Other challenges are a different init system and commands that have different sets of options than the GNU programs I'm used to.

Does there exist a guide or series of guides for OpenBSD, aimed at those coming from a Linux background? I'd be interested in reading them.

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[Last updated: 2024-04-17]