My OpenBSD Philosophy

originally published: 2023-08-27

last updated: 2023-08-27

This is a personal take on what keeps me with OpenBSD as my main operating system and daily driver. Note that I'm on no way speaking for the project itself here, only as the "private internet citizen" that I am most of the time anyway. Use it at your own risk. And while security is of course a significant argument behind OpenBSD, I am no security expert and not privy to the debates that are happening in that community.

So much for the disclaimers, now for the fun part...

Murphy's Law of personal computing: anything that can be exploited will be

I remember Windows PCs of acquaintances, riddled with autostarting adware, likely incorporating all kinds of telemetry (spyware)...

Of course there is no absolute security, but defense in depth is an actual thing.

We haven't seen the worst yet, as more or less organized crime and nation states are continuing to try to exploit what they can to further their goals.

Being able to run every piece of software under the sun is less relevant than ever

This is in part because of the browser-centric computer ecosystem nowadays that can cover many of the daily use cases, and OpenBSD is equipped with the latest versions of the most popular opensource browsers (Firefox, Chromium).

Of course this leaves the browser as an important (potential) point of failure/compromise. Fortunately, at least OpenBSD's Firefox and Chromium are designed with mitigations like pledge(2) and unveil(2) providing additional security not found on other platforms.

Computers can be a force for good or what you care about in life, but chances are that by default they will serve a different purpose

This is probably more prominent since the advent of smarphones with their app stores and in-app purchases. Nowadays, Windows includes ads in the start menu, and it has been checking for updates automatically and phoning home to Microsoft for many years. They are not alone in this - Ubuntu has telemetry enabled by default and has had partnerships with Amazon:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/ubuntu-removes-the-amazon-web-app

The bottom line is that things on your computers are increasingly designed to further tech-corporate interests rather than yours. This is something completely absent on OpenBSD from what I can discern; in part because the source code is out in the open and the funding is through the OpenBSD foundation, not any industry buy-ins.

A focus on security can promote better computing habits, and both together can protect you from your own mistakes as much as any potential adversary

It can be hard to get started with OpenBSD. This is in part because other operating systems try to cater to bad or wasteful computer habits, for example doing every little operation with a GUI even when it could be done much better in a terminal.

Computer literacy is a foundation of responsible internet citizenship

So much tries to cater to the user or consumer culture. Rather than being mesmerized by the "magic" happening behind the scenes when you perform a drag and drop operation in a GUI, it's probably better to actually understand what is happening.

This is where careful documentation and source availability play a role. Both play a big role on OpenBSD, in the man pages and the CVS source code respository.

Complex software with many dependencies becomes murky and difficult to assess for their security implications

This goes for things as simple as the OS installer - using an X11/Wayland GUI for OS installation adds many layers of potential errors and incompatibilities. OpenBSD's installer is console-based and this makes it much simpler. This extends to other aspects of the culture on OpenBSD, with a noticeable general suspicion of things that are overly abstract and convoluted, in ports, but especially in the base system.

All the performance and features in the world won't matter if you lose your data or system to an exploit or user error

I may get some marginally greater performance and some different, fancy software on other platforms in daily use, but all of that won't matter if the system suddenly breaks unrecoverably. OpenBSD takes security and code correctness seriously which is the foundation to minimize the risk for such events.

Examples from my experience:

Arch Linux rolling release breaking X11 completely multiple times, without a clear way to fix or easily roll back (note this was about 10-12 years ago).

Windows computers slowing down to a crawls over time - also some ~15 years ago, likely a combination of fragmentation, registry bloating, and unwanted^Wunneeded software hogging resources.

There is of course the oft-feared, but probably less common possibility of becoming a victim of destructive hacking attacks, e.g. ransomware...

Overt security issues and errors are problematic, but the ones you don't notice are even worse

This is where a focus on code quality matters as a principle. Even if everything is running fine for your use case, things like spyware may be operating behind the scenes or a process may be accumulating errors that eventually end in abrupt, hard-to-diagnose errors or crashes.

Note OpenBSD is complex and sophisticated enough that it is not immune to this, but stability overall has been greater than on much bigger operating systems (in terms of manpower) in my experience. The security mitigations that trip up and prevent common exploits help me sleep better at night.

My hierarchy of needs with software aligns more with OpenBSD than any other OS

Everybody uses computers differently, though there are certainly common patterns. I would argue that for many to most people, a current web browser is a significant part of their computer use along with email and chat communication. Those are also the most problematic computer uses to lose besides data storage integrity. Many other use cases can be covered by free and open source software - take LibreOffice, GIMP, Audacity, Godot...

My personal realization when first trying OpenBSD was that the benefits of running a security-focused OS outweigh the performance and software availability limitations. Note that at the time in 2014, video playback in the browser was not smooth at all on OpenBSD (which got fixed a few years later) and I made the conscious decision that watching videos and playing video games were less important than running a sane OS not subject to some of the misguided decisions that have infested other platforms.